Nick Gillespie: Last December, you published an op-ed titled "A Five-Point Plan to Save Harvard from Itself" in The Boston Globe. You wrote that Harvard is now the place where using the wrong pronoun is a hanging offense, but calling for another Holocaust depends on context, and that deplorable speech should be refuted, not criminalized. But you also note that outlawing hate speech would only result in students calling anything they didn't want to hear hate speech. Can you bring us up to date on the climate at Harvard?
Steven Pinker: Harvard is a big place. There is a diversity of opinion in co-founding the Council on Academic Freedom at Harvard. There was a rush of faculty joining us, but still a small percentage of the faculty, many of them vocal, many of them for the first time had an opportunity to just communicate with themselves across the sprawling, multiple campuses at Harvard. Many are upset at the direction that Harvard and other elite universities have taken in restricting the range of expressible opinions to a pretty narrow slice of the spectrum, to criminalizing certain opinions, to getting into needless trouble by taking stands that really should be the prerogative of its students and faculty—there isn't any reason that a university should have a foreign policy—or in general, at the level of discourse, where just calling someone a racist is considered counter-argument or a refutation.
So we formed this council to try to push back, to try to offer emotional support to those who are under attack because it can be devastating to be the target of a cancellation campaign. A lot of the problems that universities have faced have come from the fact that deans and provosts and presidents just want to make trouble go away, and so if someone is yelling at them and making their life miserable, they'll do whatever it takes to get them to shut up. We figure if we also yell at them, then they'll actually have to think about what's the optimal thing to do, rather than just do what makes the noise go down.
Gillespie: Do you feel like this time it's different?
Pinker: I think so. Harvard itself is in a kind of crisis by its own standards, which is to say that donations are down.
Gillespie: It doesn't really need the money, but it wants the money.
Pinker: Yes. And applications are down. It's become a national joke. I have a collection of memes and headlines and bumper stickers, like "My son didn't get into Harvard." An editorial cartoon of a corporate guy saying, "This guy has a stellar resume, straight A's, top scores, didn't go to Harvard." The reputation, which is a huge resource that Harvard has drawn on, is threatened. And when it's threatened, a lot of Harvard's comparative advantage will also be threatened. Harvard has a lot of money, but it also can to some extent coast on its reputation.
Gillespie: And it can only go down, right?
Pinker: At least if the past few months are any indication, it is.
Gillespie: You also pointed out in that The Boston Globe piece, and elsewhere, that it wasn't just that. Does the affirmative action case that Harvard lost play into the sense that Harvard has been moving in the wrong direction for a long period of time and needs to back up and get back on the highway?
Pinker: It certainly got Harvard's attention. The fact that it does have an outsized reputation means that it has a certain cushion. Not every department has to compete to be the best in the country because students will come, graduate students will come, donors will give.
Gillespie: You're saying that psychology doesn't really have to work very hard at all.
Pinker: Psychology has gone through waves. My former colleague Steve Cosslett is here, who made it the best department in the country when he was a chair and working behind the scenes, which is one of the reasons that I decamped [Massachusetts Institute of Technology] for Harvard more than 20 years ago. The actual quality of departments can go up and down. But Harvard has a certain buffer because of its reputation, which is now being threatened.
A lot of the things that we're proposing, like meeting the Council on Academic Freedom, would actually relieve some headaches on the administration itself, even though their prime driver is to avoid bad publicity, keep the donations going. But a lot of the trouble, especially that our former President Claudine Gay found herself in, could have been avoided if Harvard did have a more robust academic freedom policy among other things.
Gillespie: Was the plagiarism a legitimate firing offense or is that kind of a side issue?
Pinker: For me, it was a side issue, and I won't go there because that was her. Her testimony did not differ from the other two university presidents. Focusing on Claudine Gay gave us a bit of a distraction, because the problems are more, as we say, systemic. But among them are the fact that universities and their divisions feel that they have to offer moral guidance, some sort of pastoral counseling to a grateful nation, what they ought to feel in response to various tragedies and outrages. That inevitably gets them into trouble because someone will think it was too early, it was too late, it was too strong. Only one side was represented. If they just could shut up and point to a policy that said, we have to shut up, we don't comment, as the University of Chicago has done for more than 50 years, it would just get them off the hook.
Gillespie: That's the institution of neutrality. And Chicago sticks by that pretty well.
Pinker: Pretty well. That is, if a department or a center puts up a statement, then they're under pressure to take it down. The reason that it's relevant to academic freedom is that it's just prejudicial to the people working in the university, or in particular in the departments. If your department chair is posting some opinion on police shootings, or Palestine, or Ukraine…
Gillespie: Or Donald Trump, I'm sure that happens a lot. "We love Trump, I love Trump, my department loves Trump."
Pinker: All the time, yes. But it is prejudicial to the faculty and the students who have to worry, "Are my professional prospects at stake if I take a position that differs from the official one on my department website?"
Gillespie: In your world of institutional neutrality, would individual faculty be free to issue?
Pinker: Absolutely. It's just that the institution itself should be the arena. It should be the debating club. It shouldn't actually be a debater.
Gillespie: Of the five principles you mention in your article, after institutional neutrality comes nonviolence. It seems insane that you have to say that colleges should be nonviolent places. How does that fit in?
Pinker: I think we'd be actually saving the university from themselves. But the idea that a legitimate form of expression of opinion in a university campus should be forcibly ejecting a dean from his office and occupying the building, that just shouldn't be what a university is about. I think a lot of faculty have a certain nostalgia for when they did it in the '60s to protest Vietnam. It's like, isn't it cute? The younger generation is doing the same thing, but it really isn't okay for a number of reasons. It's commitment to the wrong ideals. The ideal of a university ought to be persuasion, the careful formation of arguments, not chanting slogans over bullhorns and getting in other students' faces.
Gillespie: Nonviolence includes drowning out speakers. It's one thing to protest. It's another thing to preclude somebody from speaking.
Pinker: Exactly. There should not be a heckler's veto. Protest obviously is protected, and protest could involve holding placards. It could include shouting out "you lie" in the middle of a lecture, but it can't involve forcing speakers off the stage, drowning them out, drawing a banner across the stage so that speakers can't see them. That is restricting other speech as an ostensible form of expression.
Gillespie: Do you feel like students and faculty at Harvard or elsewhere understand this isn't simply hypothetical? That nonviolence is actually a principle that we need to hold to?
Pinker: Some of us have had to make the case that it's not okay to invade a classroom and start chanting slogans over bullhorns. But we had to make the case and that the university should be consistent in cracking down on it, again to protect itself, such as the lawsuit filed by these students against anti-Semitism who have pointed to episodes in which Jewish students have been intimidated, blocked, and in one case, were assaulted. If the university just had a policy, that "speech is fine, it's okay, we encourage it, but physical force is not," and acted consistently, then they would be off the hook for selective enforcement.
If they started to enforce it against the often quite disruptive Palestinian student groups, then the Palestinian student groups could file a lawsuit saying, "Well, how come they're enforcing it against us and they don't enforce it against other groups?" If it was just clear, "This is the policy, this is what we recognize as speech, this is what we recognize as force," and be consistent, it would remove a headache from them.
Gillespie: Do you think the bookstore should stop selling Harvard-branded bullhorns?
Pinker: The first of the five-point plan was just consistent commitment to academic freedom. Because another reason that Claudine Gay got into such trouble is that when she was given what admittedly was a kind of a trap that she walked into—that is, if students called for genocide against Jews, would that be prohibited by Harvard's code of conduct—she made a pretty hardcore [American Civil Liberties Union]-style free speech argument, which came across as hollow or worse, because we've had a lecturer who was driven out of Harvard for saying there are two sexes.
There was another professor whose course was canceled because he wanted to explore how counterinsurgency techniques could be used against gang warfare. We had a professor in the School of Public Health who had cosigned an amicus brief for the Obergefell Supreme Court case against a national policy allowing gay marriage. There were calls for his tenure to be revoked, for his classes to be boycotted. He had to undergo struggle sessions and restorative justice sessions and basically grovel in front of a mob. Given Harvard's history of those cases and others, to all of a sudden say, "Well genocide, it's just a matter of I disagree with what you say, but I defend it to the death your right to say it," came off as a little bit hollow and hypocritical.
If Harvard had had a free speech policy that was reasonably enforced before that, then at least you would have had something of a leg to stand on in standing on principle. She was technically correct in the same way that there's no law in the United States that says you can't call for a Holocaust. Hate speech is protected by the First Amendment. But when it's so selectively prosecuted, then it becomes ludicrous and literally becomes a national joke or a national disgrace.
Gillespie: It's worse still that Rep. Elise Stefanik (R–N.Y.), who lead the hearing, was herself a Harvard graduate. Although I guess it would have been worse if she was from Yale or Princeton.
Pinker: There are some theories that there's a little bit of revenge motivation there because of an incident in which she was herself targeted at this invitation at the Kennedy School of Government. But there is a history.
Gillespie: It's wonderful when you find out that all big events in human history are really petty jealousy. Another one of your points is viewpoint diversity. What does that consist of?
Pinker: Academia has rightly resisted external control over content, over hiring, over promotion, which is good in protecting a university against government propaganda. On the other hand, you can get self-contained circles of people kind of conferring prestige on each other. Then you can get entrenched orthodoxies, which no one can challenge because if they do, then they are downgraded in judgments of quality, which are often so subjective.
Gillespie: The American novelist John Dos Passos was considered one of the greatest writers alive by international modernists. Then he had the misfortune of going to the Spanish Civil War and deciding that the loyalists were as bad as the Francoists. Overnight, literally, he became a terrible writer. This kind of stuff happens, right?
Pinker: If you just define viewpoint by the conventional left-right political spectrum, then things look pretty grim because according to at least a survey of The [Harvard] Crimson, 3 percent of Harvard faculty identify themselves as conservative. And out of those 3 percent, a lot of them are in their 90s, so we know where that's going. But it's not just the left-right spectrum. There can be dogmas that become entrenched within academic fields. For example, in our program of women and gender studies, I don't think you could use the words chromosome, hormone, or sexual selection; that would be not an idea that is thinkable.
Now the question is, given that universities do operate by peer review, peer evaluation, how could you open them up to the kind of viewpoint diversity that is intellectually indispensable? It's a shame that we still have to recite the arguments from John Stuart Mill about why you should listen to arguments that you disagree with, namely, maybe they're right and you're wrong. Unless you're infallible, you really should listen to other viewpoints. Maybe the truth lies somewhere in between. Maybe there's some third position you haven't thought of that would only occur to you if you hear the problems with your own position. And, even if you're right, your position is only stronger if you have to defend it against legitimate criticisms. But that case has to be made again 200 years later.
The question is, how do you rescue programs, universities, departments, fields that become self-referential echo chambers? [Psychologist] John Haidt and [political science writer] Phil Tetlock and a number of others in an article about eight years ago called for affirmative action for conservatives. Just as an idea that, especially departments of political science—as we call it, Harvard government—maybe it's not such a terrible thing to have a couple of conservatives around. That should actually be an explicit desideratum, if not a quota. But also, there might be other mechanisms, just opening the process up. We even have at universities a mechanism that's supposed to do that. There are so-called visiting committees where departments every few years are evaluated by academics from other universities, but also donors, trustees. What they're supposed to do is advise deans on whether the department is going in the wrong direction. In practice, they don't have that much influence, and they're often quite cozy with the departments themselves. But if they were more empowered to be alert to intellectual monocultures, to dogmas that have become entrenched, if that was part of their mission, that would be another, less obtrusive way of trying to mix up the ideas.
Gillespie: I suspect there are fewer and fewer Freudians in the psychology department. That's not necessarily a problem, right? As much as independent of what we do academically, we're going to enforce a political or ideological hierarchy or monoculture that has really nothing to do with academics. Is that really the problem that we're talking about?
Pinker: As a field makes progress, certain schools of thought become of historical interest. They've kind of made their contribution. You don't have to have like one Freudian, and one [Noam] Chomsky, and one structuralist, and one functionalist, but there shouldn't be a political litmus test. In many departments there really is. Sometimes it doesn't even have to pertain to the subject matter of the field. It can just be the person's reputation politically.
I was on a hiring committee for another department at Harvard, not psychology. There was an excellent candidate, who was by any standards, including his own, a political liberal, but he had some heterodox positions. He was opposed to affirmative action, for example. The department chair said, "We can't hire him. He's an extreme right-winger," meaning he had criticisms of affirmative action. You often think of academia as being at the Left Pole. North Pole is the spot from which all directions are south. The Left Pole is the hypothetical position from which all directions are right.
Gillespie: That's the final principle that you talked about, [diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI)] disempowerment. How does that happen? Why is DEI bad? And how do you minimize it?
Pinker: I have nothing against diversity, equity, and inclusion. But as Voltaire said about the Holy Roman Empire: it was neither holy, nor Roman, nor an empire. Diversity, equity, and inclusion imposes an intellectual monoculture. It favors certain groups over others. It has a long list of offenses that mean you can be excluded. But it is a strange bureaucracy. It's a culture that is kind of an independent stratum from the hierarchy of the universities themselves. The officers get hired or poached to move laterally from university to university. It's with their own culture, their own mores, their own best practices. It's just not clear who they report to, or who supervises them, or who allows them to implement policy.
One of the things that the Council on Academic Freedom discovered is that—we had to dig to do the research that—a notorious practice of the last decade in many universities has been the so-called diversity statements, where job applicants have to submit not only a statement of their research project, their teaching philosophy, but also their commitment to diversity, which in practice means endorsing a certain canon of beliefs, that there is systemic racism, that its only remedy is racial preferences, that racism is pervasive, that it is the only cause of any disparity in racial proportions. If someone in their diversity statement says, I believe that the most defensible policy is colorblindness and that the reason for racial inequities in universities is because of our educational system in high school, their application would go into the circular file.
Gillespie: How did that come to be?
Pinker: This is a good question. That is a question we've asked ourselves. First of all, no one knew that it was a policy of the Harvard Faculty of Arts and Sciences. Fortunately, unlike some universities like the University of California, where they are taken seriously, they are vetted by DEI bureaucrats before they're even sent to departments, and the ones that don't endorse what we could call a woke ideology are just filtered out.
Gillespie: You mean applications go there first before they go to the department.
Pinker: Yes. Not at Harvard, but at many universities. No one knew that we had this requirement. No one knew who implemented it. The faculty never voted on it. The president never said this is our policy going forward. A dean of arts and sciences must have signed off on it, but no one can remember who or when. But we just live with it. Likewise, freshman orientation consists of indoctrination sessions.
This is emblematic of a trend in universities, that this nomenklatura just got empowered and no one knows exactly how. What often happens is a dean gets into trouble because of some racial incident. They hire a bunch of staff, and that's their way of getting out of the trouble. Then they're there forever. And there is only one way that they've been changing and that's upward. One of the points in the five-point plan is not to necessarily abolish them—although the Florida university system has done that—but at least, just as the military is under civilian control, the DEI bureaucracy should be under the control of responsible deans.
Gillespie: Would that mean they should be under the supervision or discretion of faculty?
Pinker: Faculty or at least academic deans, like the dean of arts and sciences. The policy should be exposed to the light of day. The ones that are defensible should be kept and the ones that aren't should be abolished. But they shouldn't change the entire university structure by stealth, which is what has happened.
Gillespie: With the Harvard admissions policies that got into trouble with the Supreme Court, part of the problem was that they were lying about it. They were saying we weren't penalizing Asian students. If Harvard had been more open about it and said we want a different student body than the one that our current admissions process is giving, would you be okay with that?
Pinker: I think if it was transparent and defensible. It's odd how many policies at a university just got entrenched and no one ever kind of decided on them, defended them against criticism. But the so-called holistic admissions, which is a kind of mystical process where they won't say exactly how they do it because it's holistic, favors some mix of regional diversity. Class diversity is a good thing. Racial diversity was okay if it was for diversity, but not for rectifying injustices, but also activism, and arts, and athletics, and volunteer work, and cultural experiences, which also provided a fig leaf where in practice—as we now know from these documents—Harvard could make sure it didn't get too Asian. De facto, that's what happened. We know that in the elite schools, in the University of California system, they have gotten largely Asian because they're more meritocratic—doesn't seem to have done them tremendous harm. But Harvard did not want that to happen. So the Asian applicants, as with the Jewish applicants 75 years before, just happened to be lower in leadership and creativity, all these things that you can't measure.
Gillespie: You mentioned that Florida has banned DEI statements and things like that. That can affect state-supported institutions or state-assisted colleges. From an academic freedom point of view, this can be troubling, right?
Pinker: That is another kind of menace. I do think that it's not unreasonable for the taxpayers to have some kind of input into what it is they're supporting. But what is the best institutional arrangement where there can be input, there could be safeguards against self-serving, insular communities without it being managed by political ideologues. It's a question of institutional design that I don't even know we have the optimal design for yet. So I don't think it's unreasonable. Here I differ with some of my faculty colleagues who almost define academic freedom as professorial privilege, professorial prerogatives. Professors should be able to do anything they want, and it's no one else's business. I don't think that's right. But you also don't want, as with the McCarthy era, politically motivated, ideological restrictions or loyalty tests to be imposed by the government. But the government does have a legitimate interest in making sure universities don't go off the rails.
Gillespie: Over the past dozen years or so you've emerged as a chronicler of moral and material progress, particularly in books such as The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined, which came out in 2011, and Enlightenment Now in 2018. Can you summarize your case for progress?
Pinker: The case is that if you list what you consider dimensions of human well-being, that is, we're better off if we are alive than dead, if our babies don't die, if women don't die in childbirth, if people don't live in extreme poverty, if we're safe from violent crime, if we're not at war, if our environments are clean, if people are discriminated against on the basis of their race or sex, if children aren't beaten. If you list some reasonable things that people tend to agree are good things—it's better not to have a famine, better to be well-fed—and then you look at the best quantitative estimates over time, as you plot the trends, almost all of them get better. Not all; that would be a miracle. And they don't get better everywhere all the time. The trends are not, as we say, monotonic. The bad things don't always go down, and the good things don't always go up. There are often lurches and shocks. But in pretty much all of them, the historical trend has been, things are getting better.
Gillespie: Do you have a theory of social change? Why have things gotten better?
Pinker: I think that as knowledge increases, and as the arena of debate, discussion, power, and deliberation expands, there's just certain things that have to fall by the wayside. Barbaric practices of antiquity, like a human sacrifice—you throw a virgin into a volcano to get better weather—sooner or later you discover that's the wrong theory. That actually does not, in fact, prevent crop failures. Or that certain races are fit for slavery—that's just empirically incorrect. That women are not capable of intellectual work, but are designed just for the home.
Gillespie: Up until the late '70s, girls were not allowed to pole vault because evolution had decreed that they didn't have the upper body strength to pole vault. It seems like evolution has caught up since then.
Pinker: Right, exactly. There's just the sheer gain of knowledge. Voltaire, the way he put it, those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities. Because there are some things that people do want—they want to be well-fed as opposed to hungry and healthy as opposed to sick—when technology provides them with the means, not uniformly, because there is superstition, but in general, more people get vaccinated than don't—but that's not the only thing. As it's harder for small elites to wield absolute power, as you open up the discussion, then there are certain ideas that just aren't going to fly. You just can't defend apartheid without seeming ridiculous or monstrous.
When the world's nations came together in the late '40s to agree on a Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the question is, is there some common denominator that all of the world's countries—in the Muslim [world], in China, and India, and the Western countries—could all agree on? Or would it kind of contract to the null set, as many people suspected? It turned out the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, there's a lot of stuff in there. And most of it isn't particularly controversial, like everyone should have an education. People shouldn't be imprisoned for their political beliefs. Now, if they'd started out the drafters with something like, the first thing in the Universal Declaration is that America is a shining city upon a hill, you probably wouldn't have gotten agreement on that. Or Jesus Christ as our Savior and that is the way to redemption. Again, then the Hindus would drop out, or the Chinese. So what's left?
What's left is the conditions of human flourishing. That is, the list of things that I mentioned. It isn't controversial to say that it's better to be healthy than sick, or better for kids not to die. That realization tends to be what survives when the more parochial ideologies become untenable the circle of discourse broadens.
Gillespie: Do you think that material progress and moral progress follow the same logic?
Pinker: I think they are related. This is something that I've been looking at cross-national and cross-temporal comparisons and putting together the data that went into Enlightenment Now, I was surprised at how many good things come from being rich, for countries. People point to Sweden and Denmark and Norway as really nice places to live. You can invoke their egalitarian ethos but these are rich countries. If you look at the plot, almost any good thing—peace, safety and environmental quality against [gross domestic product] per capita—most of the countries fall on a line, with the exception of the Gulf oil states, which are rich but kind of wretched places.
An idea is that wealth is good just because it buys good stuff, like healthcare, like environmental protection, which is a luxury that you can afford after you have electricity and running water and roads and such. Education is expensive, good policing is expensive. Being rich buys you preconditions for a good life. So why isn't Saudi Arabia such a great place? They got no shortage of money. There is an idea that should be congenial to many people in this room, which is that when you have networks of exchange and commerce and markets, and that's the way you get rich, as opposed to digging stuff out of the ground, which can be monopolized by an elite and then fought over, but if the wealth comes from distributed networks of commerce and voluntary exchange, that kind of pushes people toward cooperation.
It's the old enlightenment idea of doux commerce, gentle commerce, that the American founders endorsed, and Emmanuel Kant and Voltaire and others, that if you're in a trading relationship that yokes your well-being to that of other people, so you don't kill your customers, you don't kill your debtors. If it becomes cheaper to buy stuff than to steal it, then that eliminates one of the incentives for conquest and plunder. So countries that are both affluent and get their affluence from networks of exchange tend to be pleasant in other ways.
Gillespie: They tend to be more liberal in a classical sense, right?
Pinker: In the classical and in the American political sense, in that they have more munificent welfare states. As countries get richer, they get more redistributive. Maybe less congenial here. I've heard it called Wagner's Law. The countries that people on the left tend to extol because of their welfare states also have a lot of economic freedom and also are very affluent.
Gillespie: That came up when [Sen.] Bernie Sanders [D–Vt.] was pointing to places like Norway and Sweden, which actually sometimes do better on economic freedom indexes than the U.S. There's a lot of bullshit on both sides of that debate. The people who deny progress, moral or material, what's in it for them?
Pinker: It's a question I thought about a lot. Why do progressives hate progress? I have to say that in the various political factions and bands along the spectrum, it does tend to be libertarians who are most congenial to the idea of progress. That wasn't always true, that's what I found. [Thomas] Hobbes put it well. It's a long-standing phenomenon, because I'm giving you a quote that's almost 400 years old. Let's see if I can remember it verbatim: "Competition of praise inclineth to a reverence for antiquity, for men contend with the living, not with the dead." That is, to criticize the present is a way of criticizing your rivals, your competitors. If there's something that you don't like about the status quo, you want to say how much everything sucks. You don't want to say how much better everything is than it used to be, because then you might be giving credit to the people that you're contending with. That's a big one.
There are also cognitive biases that hide progress from us, such as the availability bias as coined by [psychologists] Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman, which is that we tend to judge probability, risk, danger according to how easily anecdotes come to mind. We use our brain's search engine as a surrogate for probability. If there is a disaster, a terrorist attack, a police shooting, a famine in a part of the world, that's our answer to the question. Are things getting better or worse? Well, of course they're getting worse. I just read about the terrorist attack this morning, and that sticks in memory. Also, there's an emotional coloring to memory that even though we remember bad events in the past, we don't remember how bad they were at the time, so that the negative effect tends to wear off of memory, whereas the negative aspects of the present are still keenly felt.
This is not a new phenomenon. I'd like to quote Franklin Pierce Adams that, "nothing is more responsible for the good old days than a bad memory." That is really true. Even in our lifetimes, even though there are people, especially younger people, who kind of moan about how this is an unprecedented hellscape, in the '70s, the world had only 33 democracies. Half of Europe was behind the Iron Curtain. Spain and Portugal were literally fascist dictatorships, not just countries that people called fascist, but they called themselves fascist. Greece was under the control of a military junta, all of Latin America. So despite the recent recession, people forget how undemocratic the world was in the lifetime of many people.
Just quality of life. Like if you missed a movie in the local repertory theater, if you did live in a big city that had a repertory theater, you would never see film classics. You couldn't get access to musical performances. You got lost because you didn't have Google Maps. You couldn't look something up in Wikipedia. You had to go to this thing called the Britannica. All of these ways that our lives really have gotten better are very easily taken for granted.
Gillespie: Before we go to audience questions, you are in town partly because your photography is being shown at Brooklyn Sweet Lorraine Gallery, and your exhibition is called "2 1/2 D: The Stereoscopic Photography of Steven Pinker," which sounds like a concept album from the late '60s. Can you explain what stereoscopic photography is, and your interest in photography—and you're quite accomplished at it? Does it tie into your larger intellectual interests?
Pinker: It does. It actually goes back to my Ph.D. thesis. My Ph.D. thesis advisor is actually in the room, Stephen Kosslyn. The term "Two and a Half D" was borrowed from the artificial intelligence of 40 years ago. In particular, a researcher named David Marr proposed that that is the information that the eyes give to the brain. That is, we don't literally see the world in three dimensions because we see in perspective, both when we are physically observing a scene—you stand between two railroad tracks, you kind of see them as parallel, you know that they're parallel, but you also see them converge. You see them in perspective, and as things recede in distance, you can sense they get smaller, even though they're the same size. That's not what you'd get from an actual three-dimensional model of the world, a kind of mental sandbox. But nor is the world as flat as a pancake.
The two-and-a-half dimensions allude to the fact that the third dimension is not like the other two. It's actually computed from a number of sources of visual information. When lines converge toward the horizon, we interpret that as depth. When certain things move in the visual field faster than others, we interpret that gradient of motion as a cue to depth. But one of the most interesting is the difference in the view that the two eyeballs give you, that each eyeball is a different vantage point on the world. The views are slightly different, and the farther away something is, the closer its images are in the two eyeballs. The closer it is, the more they diverge. It's kind of a high school trigonometry problem to triangulate from the distance between the eyes, the angle and the differences in the images to how far away something is.
The brain does that trick unconsciously, and it gives us a very vivid sense of the third dimension. Now, the photography comes from—it's almost as old as photography itself. But in the 19th century, most photography was stereophotography, which means showing two images taken from two vantage points, separated by approximately the distance of the eyes, and figuring out a technological way of getting each image to be seen only by one eye. That can be done with prisms, that can be done with mirrors, that can be done with false color. The recent technology, which is one of the inspirations for the show, when I showed it to the gallery owner, it just blew him away, a new kind of monitor that gives you a stereoscopic image without any headgear, without any glasses, without any gimmicks. It just pops out through some optical wizardry. So I have ultra close-up photos of flowers which kind of reveal their shape and color in hyper-natural detail.
Gillespie: Are you an AI optimist or pessimist, or is that just a silly question?
Pinker: In principle, I am an AI optimist. You never know how technologies will be implemented. I'm not an AI doomer. I don't think that AI will enslave us or turn us into raw materials. The scenario sometimes called the "paperclips ellipse" is the scenario in which an artificial intelligence system is given a goal of maximizing manufacturing of some commodity, like paper clips, and uses every available resource, including our own bodies, to make more and more and more paper clips. That does not keep me up at night.
There are dangers like, impersonation, counterfeit people, spread of disinformation, erosion of the chain of verification of fact. There's the hypothetical technological unemployment, although we're still waiting for that to happen. But there's tremendous promise. It's kind of a shame that the first large-scale implementation of AI was kind of a gimmick: a first-person chat bot, which may have some advantages and may have some misuses. But there is tremendous promise for AI, if it's task-oriented, like autonomous vehicles that could cut down on the million people killed every year in car crashes, or eliminating jobs that no one particularly likes that are repetitive and dangerous.
Gillespie: So DEI enforcement?
Pinker: That could be the first to go. Actually, seriously, one of my postdocs who was on the job market, and she had to write a DEI statement, but couldn't do it in good conscience. So she had ChatGPT write it for her. It's actually pretty good. Very convincing.
This interview has been condensed and edited for style and clarity.
Photo Credits: Nancy Kaszerman/ZUMA Press/Newscom; Nancy Kaszerman/ZUMA Press/Newscom: Rick Friedman/Polaris/Newscom
The post Steven Pinker: What Went Wrong at Harvard appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>In this week's The Reason Roundtable, editors Matt Welch, Katherine Mangu-Ward, Nick Gillespie, and Peter Suderman assess the Justice Department's nonsensical antitrust case against Apple before turning their attention to Donald Trump's $464 million bond payment deadline in his New York civil fraud case.
00:41—Bonkers antitrust suit against Apple
20:27—Congress passes $1.2 trillion spending package
29:54—Weekly Listener Question
42:20—Trump contests $464 million bond payment in New York civil fraud case
50:52—This week's cultural recommendations
Mentioned in this podcast:
"The Absurd Apple Antitrust Lawsuit," by Elizabeth Nolan Brown
"European Union's AI Law Will Heavily Regulate a Technology Lawmakers Don't Understand," by Varad Raigaonkar
"Antitrust's Greatest Hits," by David B. Kopel and Joseph Bast
"Competition, Not Antitrust, Is Humbling the Tech Giants," by Elizabeth Nolan Brown
"Don't Let E.U. Bureaucrats Design Americans' Tech," by Jennifer Huddleston
"Joe Biden's Endless River of Debt and Regulation," by Nick Gillespie
"Marjorie Taylor Greene Introduces Measure To Oust Mike Johnson as House Speaker," by Joe Lancaster
"A GOP Plan To Raise the Retirement Age Reveals How Unserious Washington Is About Social Security," by Eric Boehm
"The National Debt Is a National Security Issue," by Eric Boehm
"'Emergency' Spending Is Out of Control," by Eric Boehm
"3 Reasons To Abolish Social Security Now!" by Nick Gillespie
"3 Reasons to Fix Social Security Now!" by Nick Gillespie and Meredith Bragg
"Brian Riedl: Who Bankrupted Us More—Trump or Biden?" by Nick Gillespie
"Science Fiction Fans Are Fighting About Politics. It's Not the End of the Universe." by Peter Suderman
Nick Gillespie's take on X on Trump's latest award:
And yet I continue to place out of the money in the annual NICK GILLESPIE AWARDS held at the Nick Gillespie Apartment and voted on by Nick Gillespie. Kudos, Donald, kudos. pic.twitter.com/nF0tB1vac6
— Nick Gillespie (@nickgillespie) March 25, 2024
Send your questions to roundtable@reason.com. Be sure to include your social media handle and the correct pronunciation of your name.
Today's sponsors:
Audio production by Ian Keyser; assistant production by Hunt Beaty.
Music: "Angeline," by The Brothers Steve
The post Biden's Antitrust Case Against Apple Is Truly Stupid appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>Reason's Nick Gillespie talked with one of the great pioneers of podcasting, Dan Carlin, the host of Dan Carlin's Hardcore History. Carlin has been putting his thoughts out there for all to hear since the aughts. His deeply researched and urgently delivered takes on everything from Julius Caesar's wars on the Celtic tribes of Gaul to 20th century Imperial Japan's horrific conquest of Asia are downloaded by the millions.
They discussed Carlin's upcoming live tour, how he would update his 2019 book The End Is Always Near: Apocalyptic Moments From the Bronze Age Collapse to Nuclear Near Misses in light of COVID-19, and whether he believes we can really learn meaningful lessons from history.
Previous appearance:
"Hardcore History's Dan Carlin on Why The End Is Always Near," by Nick Gillespie
Today's sponsors:
This interview has been condensed and edited for style and clarity.
Nick Gillespie: You're going on tour. What can fans of Hardcore History expect at a live show?
Dan Carlin: I always call them listeners. Fans seems a little self-aggrandizing to me. It's sort of a mini tour, testing the waters here. We'll see what people think of the final product. Rather than give some sort of a presentation that's the same everywhere, I opted to do a sort of a question-and-answer with, for lack of a better word, a moderator, on stage and then open it up to the audience for questions. I figure that does two things: One, it means that no show is like any other show, and it also assures that we're going to talk about what people want to hear as opposed to me assuming that they're going to like something I do on stage and maybe have some people walk away displeased with what they got. So I hope it works out like I'm assuming. We'll see.
Gillespie: You're going to Los Angeles, Salt Lake, Portland, and New York. So you're really hitting very different kinds of demographics, right?
Carlin: Yeah. So they asked me when we were talking about getting the tour started, they wanted to sample some places and just see what the reaction was, and they said, "Well, where do you go already?" I said, "Well, those four places are places I find myself for various reasons anyway." So they said, "Great. Those are four very different places, and we'll get a good idea of what the demand is in those four areas."
Gillespie: Hardcore History gets downloaded by the millions. Do you have a sense of where your listeners are? As we used to talk about in the rock mag business a thousand years ago when I was involved in that, the psychographic. Who are your listeners and what do you think they're getting out of the show?
Carlin: Well, forever we've been told in all the reputable advisement magazines or whatever's out there that we need to do more demographic research. But coming from my perspective that I've always had, I don't like when people do that to me, and so I don't like the idea of doing it to them. So I don't ask them questions about themselves or delve into who they are or what they make or where they live and then how old they are and what their religious beliefs are. But the podcasting tools that are out there now give us more information than they used to, and so you can say certain things, like you can say what states they're listening to you in the United States, what countries they're listening to you in and those kinds of things.
Basically, when we started, I feel like it was much more U.S.-centric, and now the international audience is growing more. Obviously, the big population centers, you have more people listening than in Wyoming, but that's not because people don't like you in Wyoming. It's just there's less people in Wyoming. So to give you a real answer though, no, I don't know a ton about the listeners and I don't want to. I feel like their privacy is valuable to them like mine is to me, and I feel like what the podcasting services give us is enough.
Gillespie: It's interesting, Brian Lamb, the true radical who invented C-SPAN and turned a surveillance camera on Congress and whatnot, he stepped down a few years ago, but he said that they never did ratings because they don't want to start playing to the audience, and that even if you aren't under pressure to do that, once you know who your audience is, you'll start playing to it. You've been doing this for well over a decade, almost 20 years now, right? Do you feel that way?
Carlin: Well, part of it is an advertising thing, right? So advertisers want to know that information. I mean, we do a tiny bit sometimes, but most of our shows don't have any ads at all because, to be honest, I don't like being a pitch man very much. I had to do it when I was in radio. You don't have a choice. But I always felt a little dirty unless I really liked the product. And then when you start doing the podcast, I had the advantage of being able to just say, well, if I don't either use it for real or if I don't like it, [then I don't have to promote it]. We did Audible, the audiobooks for a while, and I'm a big proponent of reading, so it was easy. We always read the reviews to make sure that even if you like the concept behind the business, that they're treating the customers well.
So I'm happy to do those kinds of things. But we don't do much advertising, so it's a luxury for me to be able to say, "We don't care about the demographics because we don't care and the advertisers that might care we really don't deal with very much." So that was easy. I see your point about the playing to the audience, but I have a different attitude about that. I feel like we self-select our audience. Somebody told me a long time ago that if you just do the shows that interests you, the people that don't like the things that interest you will eventually go away and the people that stay with you you can reliably assume like the same things you do, and so when you pick something you want to talk about, the audience has sort of already been self-selected. I don't know if that's true, but that's what I go with.
Gillespie: Not since you've been doing Hardcore History, but back in your radio days, what was the worst product that you pitched for that you were just throwing up a little bit in your mouth as you were announcing it?
Carlin: Oh God, that's a long time ago now. Off the top of my head, I can't remember, but it was a lot of restaurants. I wasn't a national show, so we didn't get those kind of national commercials. But it's funny though, I mean, I don't feel like they were too terrible because everybody on the station had to read the same ads. They weren't specifically buying from me, so it didn't sound like I'm endorsing it, but I always did prefer if they would just run an advertisement on the show rather than me do what's called a live read where you had to sound like you were endorsing something.
Gillespie: But that's what everybody wants, right?
Carlin: That is what everybody wants. Exactly.
Gillespie: In 2019, and you came on this podcast to talk about it, you published The End is Always Near: Apocalyptic Moments, from the Bronze Age Collapse to Nuclear Near Misses. This book came out just a few months before COVID became the latest apocalyptic moment. Did you feel like you were conjuring up material for the paperback or something?
Carlin: With the podcast, obviously, we have no release dates and the reason they take so long is because I really am always trying to do a better job. But when you deal with a book contract, they want their book when they think they're going to get their book. So it turned out I felt a little rushed at the end with that book, but they pushed and pushed and pushed. And then when COVID hit three or four months after the book came out, I remember thinking to myself, "Well, shoot, had it been up to me, I would've missed that because the book would've come out two months after COVID hit and that whole chapter would've been ruined."
There were no warm fuzzy feelings about having thought about that before it happened because millions of people were being affected. To be honest, I know the standard technique is to claim credit for all these things, but I mean, really I was one of the last people on the bandwagon of saying we're vulnerable to another pandemic. I mean, there were a lot of people running around for years saying, "Warning, warning, warning." We had near misses. We had avian flu and we had things a lot worse. So it didn't take a genius to see that coming. I do think the timing was just a little weird.
Gillespie: I remember when COVID hit and the lockdown started, it seemed at first that the market for podcasts seemed to collapse a little bit because people weren't commuting to work anymore. I mean, were people more interested in what you were talking about during the pandemic or less, or did you notice any difference?
Carlin: I think it's binge watching on TV. Again, this sounds awful. We did well during the COVID thing, and we've seen a drop-off since, but I think it's because people are back at work working and things like that. I think we had a time period where people were stuck in the house with nothing to do. When we're doing audio podcasts, one of the real benefits of audio over video is that you don't have to watch something and you could be mowing the lawn or ironing a shirt or making dinner and still have the ability to multitask. So I feel like during COVID, people took the opportunity to listen to what we were doing while they were doing something else, or just we were a good time waster, right? My shows are long.
Gillespie: Is history the story of massive forces that sweep over whole periods of time, or is it about heroic individuals who actually changed the course of history?
Carlin: Well, I was reading something that historian Adrian Goldsworthy wrote recently where he was talking a little about that and he was saying that while it's kind of discredited to think about individuals having such an outsized role on history, he said, "All we have to do though is look at current events and see how much the personalities of single individuals seem to be important to how current events play out to understand that this would've been the dynamic in the past also."
Now, I think we all understand that there's an interplay between these people and the opportunities that they have because of what's going on in the world, the times we live in and all these other things for them to do what they do. So if you get an outsized personality on the scene and they're driving a lot of events, I think it's fair to ask yourself, "Would this person have been able to do this with the conditions we were living under 30 or 40 years ago?"
So I think there's a little bit of an axis of two lines crossing. One line is the personality of the people involved, and the other axis are the events, the trends, the forces of the times we live in. When those things intersect, I think that's when you hit that sweet spot where all of a sudden you're looking at some personality and you go, "If not for that person…." I always try to imagine as a way of trying to get some perspective plugging somebody else in that role, right? If Richard Nixon wins the '60 election and he's the one handling the Cuban missile crisis, does it go the same or does it go differently? Or better yet, what if the Cuban missile crisis happens a few years earlier and you have Gen. [Dwight D.] Eisenhower in the White House?
Those are fun ways in my mind of trying to game this out to get a little bit of perspective about what's more important here, the trends in the forces or the individual involved, because if you say, "It would've turned out the same with Nixon or Eisenhower as it did with [John F.] Kennedy," then you start to think maybe it's more of a trends and forces ascendant moment. But if you say, "Hmm, I don't think it does turn out the same with those other people," well, then you can I think actively say that having Kennedy in the White House at that place in time and under those circumstances actually made history go in a different direction than it otherwise would.
Gillespie: Do you have historical figures that you consider heroes? And if so, what are your criteria?
Carlin: Oh man, I should have a ready answer to a question like that, shouldn't I? It's funny, but off the top of my head, no one comes immediately to mind, but that's not because there aren't people that I greatly admire. I think personality-wise, I am not much of a hero worshiper. First of all, sometimes I look at people and I just wonder if I could have done what they did. So for example, you look at people like in the civil rights struggle in the 1950s and 1960s, when you look at the death threats that those people got, I always ask myself, "Would I have forged ahead knowing that people are talking about hurting my kids or firebombing my house or those kinds of things?" To me, rather than the hero side of it, which is not really part of my personality, sometimes I measure myself against these other people and just say, "Man, I might be craven or cowardly or selfish." I'm not sure I do. So I mean, there's admiration there, but not hero worship, if that makes sense.
Gillespie: Not too long ago, a guy named Daniel Akst wrote a book called War by Other Means, which was a study of conscientious objectors during World War II. I don't necessarily agree with them at all on the question of conscientious objection to World War II, but looking at those guys and what they put up with, I mean, it was like being under a mile underwater with the pressure on you to just cave. It's pretty remarkable. I think we tend to think that we're going to be the person who stands out in a crowd, but we're probably kidding ourselves.
Carlin: Well, if nothing else, it's the old line of these are the times that try men's souls. I mean, you look at these kinds of things and you just go, "Hmm, would I have been the one to shelter a Jewish person in occupied Europe?" Of course, those are the tests. You don't know until you get there. But I do feel like when I read these stories, rather than hero worship, I sometimes feel a little shamed by the whole thing and worried about how I might react in the same situation. So there's admiration, for sure.
Gillespie: You define yourself as a pessimist—and maybe that's not right, maybe you're a realist—but one of the things that your podcast shows again and again is that all societies collapse. All civilizations end at some point. I also hear you talking about how things get better or different and things like that. When you think about something like COVID happening, do you feel like we've gotten to a better place, or are you a long-term pessimist but a short-term optimist? Are you a mid-range person? How do you define yourself and how do you apply the lessons of history that you analyze and dig out in your podcasts into your life span?
Carlin: To me, that's kind of a macro-micro question because I think on a micro level, like an individual human level, there are always bad places to find yourself: bottom of the economic scale, trapped in a murderous dictatorship like North Korea. I mean, I feel like on an individual level, there's awful places to be in any period in history, and they're probably equally terrible to some degree or another.
On a macro level, there are obviously times and places that are better than others, right? So I think that sometimes you're lucky to find yourself in a nation that's technologically sophisticated and wealthy on the macro level of things, [where there's] health care if you get hurt [and] not too many invasions during your lifetime. Things like that.
I do think not so much that it's cyclical, because I think that brings up certain theories of history that are arguable, but I do think you feel like nothing lasts forever, whether it's good times or bad times. So I think sometimes this idea that we're living in a particularly good time or a particularly bad time isn't so much pessimistic. Listen, I'm 58 years old right now, and life is good, but you can't help but notice that when you're 58, life isn't going to be good forever, right? So I don't think that's being pessimistic to just know that all good things must pass and hopefully all bad things must pass because change is inevitable. If things are good, what does change mean, right?
So I do think that maybe from the perspective where we're looking at this—20th century or 21st century American citizen, for example, in the grand historical scheme—you're living in one of the best times and best places to ever be around. So the likelihood of that getting better vs. the likelihood of that getting worse would seem to indicate that change is likely to bring a lessening of the good things just because we've had it so good so long, but it doesn't mean it has to happen. It's an odds game, right? Maybe the odds are just 70/30 against wonderful things continuing, but people have made money in Vegas with odds worse than that.
Gillespie: Yeah. I think it was in an episode or an interview that you did with Rick Rubin, the record producer, where you mentioned that your father was a Korean War vet.
Carlin: As he would say, he was in the Navy, so it doesn't quite count the same as being at the Chosin Reservoir or something like that. He was eating ice cream on an aircraft carrier.
Gillespie: Also, he grew up pretty poor, right?
Carlin: Yeah, really poor.
Gillespie: So I'm a couple years older than you and my father served in World War II, was an infantry man, and I feel in a profound way that I lucked out tremendously by escaping a lot of history. Do you think we'll go back to a world that is like the ones that our parents might have grown up in where there is grinding poverty and where war is taken for granted? I think back a lot to my parents who were both born in the '20s. They were the children of immigrants and they grew up during the Depression, then there was World War II. And then when World War II ended, they were like, "OK. Well, it's good. People aren't being killed as much anymore, but we're still going to be poor." And then something happened and they stopped being poor. Do you think we might see a reversal like that in our lifetimes?
Carlin: Well, I think that's macro-micro also. In the macro sense, look, from an international relations standpoint, you don't have to be a genius to see the situation. Let me back up and say that I always think about things in much longer time frames than most people just because that's how I try to make sense of history. It's not better, it's not worse, it's just how I do it. So I always imagine 50 or 60 or 70 years not being all that long in the grand scheme of things. If you look at it through that sort of a time frame, we've been living in the post–Second World War, dual superpower, the United States being the only country with a really functioning economy and not hurt in the Second World War among all the great powers. That's a temporary situation.
Now, if it's a 70-year temporary situation, that's a lifetime. So it seems like a long time to my mom, [who was] born in 1938. All she can really remember is that era. But we're exiting that era now and returning to what they would've probably called in the 1920s a return to normalcy in an international relations sense, not hegemony, but a multipower world. I mean, look at the number of powers you had before both World Wars. It's between four and six major powers. That's much more normal than having two hegemonic powers facing off against each other with their alliance systems.
So I think from a military macro standpoint, international relations, I think you're going to see things we haven't seen in a while and I think we already see things we haven't seen in a while, including a real change in warfare, which is going to upset things, what they call an RMA, a revolution in military affairs. People don't always notice these things so much when they're happening, but I mean, for example, look at how drones in the war between Russia and Ukraine have sunk ships. That's going to be such a huge thing.
There was a piece in The Wall Street Journal today about the mixing of drones, mass swarms of drones with future artificial intelligence capabilities, getting them to work together and what that would mean for things like big, expensive surface ships. Well, those are the kind of things that change the world. I mean, they don't seem like that big of a thing, but if all of a sudden a $13 billion aircraft carrier is a vulnerable piece of floating hardware and you can't use those anymore, and if something like the United States' power projection is based on a weapon system like that, well, then you can see how all of a sudden that makes things topsy-turvy.
The funny thing that most people don't understand necessarily is how this sort of military question actually resonates and pings off a lot of nonmilitary things that affect our lives. Now, in the micro sense of the word, when you get away from these big power changes that we were talking about, I don't know. "I don't know" is the answer. Rephrase the question for me. I'll see if I can frame it in more micro terms.
Gillespie: I guess I might want to stick with the idea of what happens when we go back to a world that has half a dozen or a dozen powers because that does seem to be where we're headed. The fact is Japan is still a major power. Russia is still a major power even if the Soviet Union doesn't exist, but then you throw in China and whatnot. But is world history ultimately military history or is it the history of trade? Is it the history of migration? Where do you see those lines intersecting?
Carlin: Well, I often talk about this when I'm talking about why people are interested in history, whether they know it or not, and that's because history is everything that's ever happened. Sometimes I'll do speaking engagements with schools, and you'll have middle school students or high school students that really don't want to hear some guy talk to them about history. What I try to teach them is that because of the way history has to be segmented into so-called important events or important dates, that's a construct of historians. What choice do they have? I mean, imagine writing the history book of everything. You can't do that, right? So the main thing that historians try to do is find out what's important. I mean, even these chapters where we decide one era has ended and another began is part of the human construct of just trying to organize everything that's ever happened.
So what I tell students is that the truth is that you don't necessarily have to understand when Columbus stumbled upon the Americas. That's an important event according to somebody else. If you're interested in motorcycles or fashion or dentistry or dogs or whatever you are interested in, there is a history of that and that's part of the past too. The actual idea is that there is no rule about what's important in the past. What's important in the past is what is important to you, and then it has a past. The most important thing in my mind, and this is what I tell the students, is context and understanding how things go from where they were to how they are.
So what I always tell these kids, I say, "If you're interested in motorcycles, find the first motorcycle ever built and find the one that just came out yesterday and then trace the development from one to the other, right? So you start to see the process of change in historical development and how things move over a course of decades or whatever, and that teaches you the idea of the history of moving events." And then ask yourself when you're looking at these different motorcycles over the different eras, why they are the way they are, right? I mean, is this the engine that they're using at the time and why did a new engine come? It teaches you the context that creates the circumstances about how these new motorcycles get developed, why they have these new features, these new parts.
So between the two of them, the context and the idea of historical change, you are getting the most important part. People are going to forget 1492, most of them, the minute the test is over and they leave the classroom, but they're not going to forget the important parts of context and the historical change process if they learn it with something that they're already interested in and that has a past that's as much a part of the grand history of things as anything else is.
Gillespie: It's interesting when you're talking, I find that completely convincing. I notice that you don't say the word "progress." Do you believe in progress or do you think that that's kind of a badly value-laden term that obfuscates as much as it clarifies?
Carlin: Maybe the latter, only because progress is an "in the eye of the beholder" thing, first of all. Second of all, I think progress assumes that it's sort of a one-way street. There's a book called Global Catastrophic Risks that I fell in love with. It's edited by a guy named Nick Bostrom who works at the the Future of Humanity Institute at Oxford or whatever. Every chapter of the book is written by a different expert, and every chapter is sort of a way the world could end. It's a fascinating book, but in the introduction of the book, Bostrom writes about what he calls existential threat. I was always taught that existential threat means elimination, right? So an existential threat to humanity means humanity just goes away, disappears, the last person dies and it's over, but he has a different definition of it.
One of the definitions of existential threat [is] that everybody goes away, one, but it also includes if humanity gets knocked backward in terms of capabilities and never again reaches its former abilities. So if you imagine that we have a nuclear war and that we lose the ability to put a man on the moon and we never get that back, to him, that's an existential outcome. In your question about progress, that implies that we're never going to move backward, and I think that history has shown over and over that, well, it doesn't mean you that you will, but it means you can, right? I mean, look at the post-Roman empire when you've got crumbling aqueducts and you can't replace them. Well, that's a little like the thing we said about not being able to go back to the moon when you've already been or losing an internet and never getting one back.
To me, progress implies an ever-moving single direction toward bigger, better things and improved capabilities, and I think that that's not a given. I think it's like striking a match; it's possible that, for example, the Roman Empire or China at its height in earlier eras was striking a match and having it snuffed out before we finally got the roaring fire going for good. Maybe having a global world environment prevents a collapse of one segment of the globe. For example, had the Roman Empire been in contact with the rest of the world during that time period, maybe that would've prevented things from going backward because there's a China to relight the pilot lights, so to speak. I don't know. But to me, there's a teleological aspect to progress that I'm not sure I buy into. But look, I'm always hoping for better things, but I'm not sure it's a given that things are always going to get better. I think just maybe that's the pessimism you talked about earlier.
Gillespie: I don't believe in golden ages really, but to the extent that they are defensible, we're in a golden age of people being able to dig into the past of their own making, of creating their own usable past. The past is kind of an infinite attic or a cellar where you can rummage through and construct a lot of different stories that help you make sense of where you are and who you want to be and where you want to go both on an individual level as well as on a societal level. Do you feel like people are cognizant of that?
Carlin: I don't know how to answer that because I don't know what people are doing. This is always a problem, it's not like this is new, but it's specifically something that I notice now and maybe it just grates on me more. I feel like we've never been more likely to judge people from the past by current modern moral sensibilities, which is always something that I feel like obscures the past rather than illuminates it. I had a professor once who was so good at trying to get us to put ourselves in the shoes of people from the past and ask the question, "When they do things that we think are despicable now, was that their goal? Were they trying to do despicable things?"
I think, going from memory here, we were talking about people who tried to convert natives to Christianity, and the current line of thinking at the time was that this was an awful thing to do. We were destroying native cultures and their belief systems and forcibly taking them away from their families and teaching them the white man's religion. We can determine now that that was a huge loss in terms of what those people could have preserved, their native culture and belief system, and passed on to their children and all these kinds of things, but was that the goal at the time, to do something negative? He said, "No." He said, "You have to look at the way those people who did the converting saw the world."
You could see it with the Spanish when they came to the New World. If you literally believe that your view of religion is correct and that there is a fiery place called Hell that you will go to if you don't believe what they tell you to believe or what they believe, and then they convert somebody to believing that, then they think they've done a good thing. Now, that doesn't mean they have done a good thing. But when we look back on the past and judge people, I hate the judging thing, but when we judge people, we do so because every generation before us has done the exact same thing. We judge people based on our own modern sensibilities whenever modern is, and I think then we infuse people in the past sometimes with sort of evil overtones that if you could bring them back in a time machine would confuse and befuddle them, not because they didn't do something that we could objectively look at today and say is bad, but because that wasn't their goal at all. They thought they were doing good.
The reason I bring this up is because it's very, very, very possible, in fact, almost inevitable, that the same thing is going to happen with us. It's down the road in the future, they're going to look back on us and absolutely demonize us for any number of things that we couldn't possibly know. I mean, airplane travel, eating meat, experimentation on animals.
Gillespie: There was a book that was very popular about antebellum America by a popular writer named Lydia Maria Child. She was writing before Nathaniel Hawthorne, really, but she writes a story that's set in colonial Salem, Massachusetts. She talks about how we now look at the Puritans as ridiculously closed-minded, horrible people, and we should understand them in context. I'm going to ruin it for people. It was published 170 years ago, so I feel like the statute of limitations has expired on spoiler alerts, but it ends with a Native American who the main character has a child with disappearing and just being literally and figuratively written out of the story.
You read the book now, and she's trying to make a point that you just made. From a modern sensibility today, you're like, "Oh my God, this is an incredibly racist book that depends on the erasure of Native Americans." So, we're always like that. I think it was in an addendum episode with The Rest Is History guys, where you were talking about Thomas Jefferson, who obviously is a morally complex and in many ways just a compromised character, but that he also gave rise to a matrix of rights that were used by people like Frederick Douglass and others to argue for their rights. So history is much more complex than we ever really want it to be at any given moment.
Carlin: I come from a family tradition. I had a grandfather that was very big on "Don't judge other people until you've walked a mile in their shoes." This was really hammered into us, and it turned out to be a really good tool when I got into history as a history major. The funny thing is you can go back to the ancient Romans. I mean, you read their "histories." Go read ancient Greeks like Plutarch. Plutarch's entire work on Lives, which is his famous book, is comparing historical figures to each other, this person against that person, this person. What he's trying to do is make moral judgments even then. This is ingrained in us somehow to want to say, "This person's bad. This person's good," but the criteria we're using is the criteria of whatever time we're doing the assessment in, and that is an inherently flawed problem because that's a moving target, right?
The moral sensibilities are always changing, which is why you can look at a lot of historical figures who's…. I mean, look at Alexander the Great. Depending on the era you're assessing that guy in, he comes off as awesome or terrible and then sometimes back again. To me, that's not a bug though, that's a feature because I think that makes history much more interesting than if we have evil figures and good figures, and those figures are permanently in stone in their positions. History is a moving target.
This I tell people all the time too, they don't realize that history is not like math, right? It's not two plus two equals four. There's a Fox News version of history and an MSNBC version of history. Depending on which source you grab from which era, you're going to get a completely different spin on the events, how they occurred, who's responsible, and what they mean.
Gillespie: Somebody like Winston Churchill. Depending on if you're raised in America or England, you love Winston Churchill. It's not complicated. He was the man who saved the West. But if you're from the Indian subcontinent, you have a radically different view of Winston Churchill. We shouldn't pretend as if one side or the other doesn't exist. We should really sit with the complications and try and work things out rather than dismiss that, which makes us have to work to understand things better.
Carlin: Sometimes I ask myself, "What's realistic to imagine someone doing?" Now, we should point out that someone like Churchill lived long enough and was involved in politics. He didn't die until 1965. He was born in the 19th century and was active politically almost that whole time. So we're talking about a figure that spanned the British Empire at its height to the post-war British coming down from imperial heights. So this is a person that in the whole second half of his career was somewhat of a political dinosaur. So contextually speaking, he had detractors during his lifetime and political career. Before the Second World War broke out, there were a lot of people that thought he was a warmonger.
So that's a wonderful example of what we were talking about earlier, when the axis gets crossed between the individual meeting the proper time and place. And Churchill knew it. I think he said something like if he could go back in time, he would always choose May 1940. That was his moment, and he knew it.
But to me, someone like Churchill, you have to ask yourself how much that guy could have been different given where he came from, his influences growing up. Again, to me, that's a little like what we talked about earlier, where you're judging the Spanish priest for what he's doing, trying to save people from Hell. How much did that guy have any agency in thinking any differently?
So I don't want to write off good and evil in the past because I think that if you take this too far the wrong way, it makes you not able to judge [Adolf] Hitler or not able to judge [Joseph] Stalin. So we have to be careful, but at the same time, I do try to sit there and go, "OK, these people are all products of their time and political and social environment and the civilization they came from, and we have to take that into account too."
Gillespie: How do you decide what you're going to get into, or do your topics find you? I mentioned "Supernova in the East," which is a real achievement. I mean, just of you being able to sustain that level of intensity and engagement with the topic. The "Celtic Holocaust" series is amazing too, but do you go looking for just these horrifying episodes in the past, or do they find you?
Carlin: Well, first of all, you're really kind. I appreciate that. I'm not always as easy on myself as you are on me, right? Well, thankfully, the "it's not me" thing though is part of the motivation. I mean, a lot of these stories, that's what makes me think of them as interesting, right? Oh my God, can you imagine being here and these people in this time period? I mentioned self-selection of the topics earlier. If I'm interested in it, that right there is requirement No.1, because we don't have scripts for these shows. So I don't read them and then think, "I'll write a script for this and then I'll record it." I just go in and record it. So it's based on inspiration. So if I'm not into the topic, it just doesn't work. You would hear it in my voice, right?
It's also why I can't talk about certain things. I'll get requests from people like, "Can you please talk about 17th century India?" I'll have to say no. I said, "Because I don't know anything about 17th century India, and I couldn't learn enough about it in the short span of…." It's funny, the listeners think it's forever between shows, but if you're trying to educate yourself from ground zero, it's a short amount of time. So all of these topics we choose, the No.1 requirement is that I have to be interested in them. No. 2 requirement is I have to have some foundation of knowledge that we can then build upon. So all these topics that we do shows on, I knew something about before we did them.
And then a lot of what I'm learning is what I've gotten wrong by reading histories from a long time ago, because a lot of these stories, there's a lot of new histories that I haven't read since the last time I was heavily into the topic, and that turns the tables on a lot of the old ideas about what really happened and who was responsible. Sometimes secrets come out that were not available. There's a lot of stuff in the Second World War we know now that even when I was a kid growing up we didn't know. Enigma machines, for example. Stuff like that. So I have to know something about it. I have to be interested in it.
As far as what I'm interested in, well, a lot of these stories you may have noticed have what we call here when I'm doing them spines, philosophical spines. The ancient historian Thucydides said once that history is philosophy taught by example. That's another one of those things that gets a lot of flack today, because in some senses it's wrong, but in some senses it's not. In the sense that it's not wrong, we try to find some deeper philosophical question that the story highlights.
So we did one called the "Destroyer of Worlds," which was about the early years of trying to live with nuclear weapons. The spine in that one is, can human beings learn to live with the power of their ever-evolving weapons system? So even if you manage to live with what we have today and design systems and safeguards and everything, what happens when you invent the next most powerful weapons system after that? So that's an idea, a philosophical question that runs through the entire show.
Most of the shows we do, not all of them, I don't want to ever have a formula or slip into a rut or have a format, so sometimes we switch it up just to be different and get out of the sameness of it all, but most of the shows have a philosophical throughput idea that we're trying to explore. A lot of times that's the first thing that makes me go, "Aha. Well, this would be a good thing to talk about because exploring that philosophical throughput idea would be interesting." Those are the many things that have to cross together to make me go, "Ah, that would be a fun show."
And then the last thing is more of a practical thing. I will look at the shows that we've recently done, and I try to look at the archives the same way I look at history, trying to imagine it 10 or 15 or 20 years from now and ask, "Do we have a nice mix?" Because we usually keep about 10 shows free, and then we move them to the paid archive after four or five years. I try to make sure we have enough diversity, subject matter diversity in the 10 or so free shows so that if you didn't like "Supernova in the East," which was about the Second World War in the Pacific and Asian theater, and we have six maybe shows on that, do I have a couple shows then from widely differing periods? So you could go, "Oh, I'm really not interested in that. Oh, but I like the idea of the Romans and the Celtic people, so I'll listen to that show." So there are some attempts to try to switch it up a little bit in terms of historical periods or throughput ideas or that kind of thing.
Gillespie: What would you say is the happiest show that you've done?
Carlin: Oh, that's a trick question, isn't it? I did one once called "The Organization of Peace" that was about the League of Nations. The whole League of Nations thing is this almost rainbows and unicorns attempt to try to imagine a better world through a shared understanding that we had just been through the worst war in the history of the world and we never want to go through that again. There were so many fun aspects of it, like the idea…. It was a minor idea. It was never this major League of Nations proposal, but the idea of Esperanto and the idea that we have to have human beings communicate better if we want to avoid the kinds of things that happened before. So we all need to speak the same language, right? So there's a lot of hopeful stuff in that show because the League of Nations itself was almost a naive attempt to hope for a better world and try to figure out what the heck would be involved in working toward it. So that might be the most hopeful one.
Gillespie: What's the function of history for you?
Carlin: I truthfully look at it more like the past is there to teach us what can happen, right? So it's a little showing you the Black Swan phenomenon in terms of examples. So when you say something like, "Well, how could this go sideways on us?" You have examples you can point to in terms of the worst case scenario. I mean, what the past doesn't teach are the kinds of lessons that most people want it to teach. So for example, you'll often hear someone say something like, "Well, we know appeasement doesn't work because look what happened with Hitler in the 1930s." But that's not what history teaches you because you're not taking into account the variables, right? First of all, Hitler's a person. All dictators are not exactly the same, and all circumstances aren't exactly the same. So you can't turn around and say, "Well, we learned from Munich that you can't appease dictators, therefore we shouldn't appease Saddam Hussein because he's going to act exactly like Hitler acted. We know that because Hitler acted that way." It doesn't work like that.
Now, what it can show you is what a worst case scenario might look like if things go sideways like they did in the late 1930s. What history really teaches you is how contextually things get involved. When we see, for example, rights being taken away from people in a society, like political parties being banned or safeguards that keep people from being able to be thrown into prison without any sort of due process, I think history teaches you what's going to follow next in most of those cases. Usually, it's benign, but that doesn't teach you anything specifically. It teaches you generalities, but I do think it's useful in that sense.
Now, the [George] Santayana quote about if you did not learn from history, you're doomed to repeat it, I think, one, it doesn't work that way because we take the wrong lessons. You can't use dictators because of Munich. I also think that people use history to have it prove what they want it to prove, you have these ideas that you could go back and construct it in ways, or you can choose historical approaches in ways that lets you say two plus two equals five, if you want it to. There's an old line that even the devil can quote scripture for his purpose, and history is far more subject to that than biblical narratives are, right? So that's why I think you have to be careful about this idea about history teaching X, Y, or Z and become suspicious of the teacher that teaches you that.
There are things to learn, but they're much more amorphous and much less specific. So that's what I would say. And then the idea that it could hurt you to learn from the past, well, it can, depending on what they're trying to teach you. Especially give it a sideways glance and ask what the person trying to teach you about the past is trying to get you to understand. But for broader generalizations that we talked about earlier, about how I talked to kids about context and how things evolve, I think those are really valuable lessons, but they're not very useful necessarily in applying specifically to individual cases.
The post <em>Hardcore History</em>'s Dan Carlin: 'History Is Not Like Math' appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>This interview has been condensed and edited for style and clarity.
Reason: Having been in the libertarian movement for nearly half a century, how do you assess the current state of libertarian ideas and the broader libertarian movement?
Boaz: I think there are a lot more libertarian ideas. When I was in college and thought of myself as a libertarian—but also thought of libertarians as part of the conservative movement—who did we have as intellectuals? [Friedrich] Hayek and [Milton] Friedman and [Ludwig von] Mises.
It was kind of a good set of years there, because Hayek won the Nobel Prize in '74—which was stunning to us, because even as naive college students we knew nobody like that had won a Nobel Prize before. Then in 1975, [Robert] Nozick won the National Book Award, which really helped to put libertarianism on the map of political philosophers. Then in 1976, Friedman won the Nobel Prize. I was out of college then, but that period really boosted libertarian academic credentials.
These days, just like everybody says, we have nobody like [Ronald] Reagan and [Margaret] Thatcher. But in the time of Reagan and Thatcher, they said, "Where are the people like [Winston] Churchill and [Franklin] Roosevelt?" I look back and say, "Wow, weren't those great? And who is that today?" But at least one answer is there's a lot more libertarian intellectuals today. Maybe nobody is a Hayek these days, but there's definitely a lot more libertarianism in the academy, more libertarian intellectuals, more people reading those people. Some of them even get published by major publishers. There's more of that, and I think that means there's more people who think of themselves as libertarians.
What's the essence of libertarianism for you?
To me, the essence of libertarianism is the nonaggression principle. You have no right to initiate force against people who have not initiated force against you. From that comes freedom of speech, freedom of religion, freedom of property and markets, ideally within an ethos of cosmopolitanism and pluralism and tolerance. At that point, we're kind of talking about liberalism, and these days I'm worried not just about libertarianism, but about liberalism.
Cosmopolitanism, tolerance, pluralism—where do those come from and why should those be interconnected? If we compare the nonaggression principle to the core of a nuclear reactor, why should the surrounding framework be akin to cosmopolitanism?
I think libertarianism is set within classical liberalism, and I think of libertarianism as the intellectual core of liberalism, the intellectual vanguard. I often say I'd like to be part of a libertarian intellectual vanguard leading a broader liberal movement. And for my whole career, we haven't had that. We've had liberals divided into people who emphasize free markets and people who emphasize civil liberties and tolerance and equality under the law for all. Libertarians have not had a great record on equality under the law for all, although I think it's clearly inherent in what we believe. But you didn't see many libertarians involved in the Civil Rights Movement, critical of Jim Crow, and they should have been, and they should have been out there.
The Cato Institute, where you've spent most of your career, was founded in 1977 in San Francisco. How did it come into being?
Ed Crane was in Washington running the MacBride for President campaign in 1976, and he observed that [the American Enterprise Institute] and Brookings had a significant influence on limited budgets. And he said, "There ought to be a libertarian think tank, one representing the values of the American Revolution." So he talked to Charles Koch, who had money to help. And Charles said, "OK, I'll put some money up if you'll run it." And he said, "Well, you don't want me to run it because it needs to be in Washington, and I'm going back to San Francisco." And, as he used to tell it, "Charles was smarter than I was, and he knew if I started this, I would in a few years realize it should be in Washington."
The idea was to set up a think tank that was neither liberal nor conservative, and that would put libertarian ideas on the policy map, as well as just the pure theory map.
What were the big issues in the 1970s that you guys were obsessed with?
The big influences in the early '70s were Vietnam, Watergate, and stagflation. I used that trio often to explain why there was an efflorescence of libertarians in the 1970s. The government had just accomplished Vietnam, Watergate, and stagflation, which gave people a very different view of a government that they perceived as having solved the Depression and won World War II. It was a different generation that was coming up.
What were the main issues? The answer is they're kind of the same issues over and over. History is not a bunch of new things. It's one damn thing, over and over. For Cato, the original agenda was, "Well, we're going to take on Social Security, the linchpin of the welfare state. We're going to take on school choice, which underlies so many problems. And we're going to take on the foreign interventionist state." Early on, we were writing about all of those things. Our first real book was about an alternative to Social Security, how to get out of it. At least one of our first papers was on Social Security, but we had a very early pro-immigration paper. We had a very early paper on conscription, which was a live issue at that time.
Is Social Security unstoppable at this point?
That seems to be the observation all over the world. We've made a lot of progress on free trade. We've made a lot of progress on human rights, civil rights, women's rights, gay rights. We've made some progress on some microregulation issues. We're making some now on housing. We repealed a lot of the New Deal regulations in the 1978 to '81 era. When people say we're on the road to serfdom, I tell them about all these things. We ended conscription, we ended the [Civil Aeronautics Board], we ended the [Interstate Commerce Commission]. We created a structure that continuously brought tariffs down. All those things were progress. There was significant progress, and people still say, "Yes, but what about all this government spending and everything?" I think the answer there is once you create a program that people think they're getting benefits from, it's very hard to take those benefits away.
We can argue that Social Security is not, on net, benefiting people, but there's a huge constituency of people who paid money in and they don't want it taken away from them. That's true for every program. It's true for the farm program. That's one of the reasons that we always say it is so important to stop a new entitlement in the beginning. Because Medicare was expected to cost a billion dollars a year, 10 years after it was founded. That was crazy. It was much more than that. You've got to stop it.
In the '80s, what was your attitude towards Ronald Reagan? A lot of libertarians, or people leaning libertarian, would say he was really good. Is that right or is that wrong?
My own trajectory with Reagan was in the '70s. I was in [Young Americans for Freedom] and I went to the 1976 convention on behalf of Reagan, not as a delegate, but just there to cheer him on and everything. I liked Reagan, and I was actually a delegate to the state convention or maybe the county convention for Reagan.
Then in 1978, I got hired to work on the Clark for Governor campaign, and that shifted my allegiance. Ed Clark for governor, California 1978—the first big Libertarian Party campaign that actually had some money and a professional staff of me and one other guy [laughs].
While Reagan was president, I was a libertarian, and we were pretty much critical of everything he did. Well, not everything, but many things he did. As time went on, and we saw other presidents, I think we got nostalgic for the Reagan-Thatcher era—two people who, even if they didn't always live up to it, did enunciate a lot of libertarian rhetoric. I think Thatcher in England revived British entrepreneurship and appreciation for enterprise. Reagan did some of that too. I think to a great extent, Reagan's speeches about freedom revived the American spirit, maybe as much as his tax cuts did.
How disastrous was the George W. Bush administration for America and for libertarian advances?
That was pretty bad. And we were sort of optimistic when he came in! We didn't like Republicans. They did a lot of bad things. But Bush had told Ed Crane that Cato's Social Security plan was on the right track, and he wanted to do something like that. Early in his administration, he appointed a commission, which we were sort of opposed to because a commission is usually the way to put an idea to bed. But it turned out he appointed a commission of Republicans and Democrats that was stacked in favor of some kind of privatization. So that was good.
But then 9/11 happened, and Bush got distracted from everything else. Then he gets reelected, and he says, "I'm going to use my political capital on reforming Social Security." It turns out, somehow he got reelected but everybody hated him. We did a poll at the time, and we said, "Would you support an idea that would allow you to put your own money into retirement and then not take Social Security at the end?" And 60 percent said, "Yeah, that sounds good." When we said, "President Bush has a plan," it got 40 percent approval. So that kind of killed it.
How bad was the war on terror and the USA PATRIOT Act, for libertarian ideas?
It was definitely bad that we got the PATRIOT Act, but also, just the general [feeling that] we have to respond with war. We even have to invade Iraq, which had nothing to do with 9/11. And the PATRIOT Act and the surveillance state that was created—very bad for the country, bad for libertarians too, although it gave us a lot of targets to complain about. But we didn't get very far in aiming at those targets.
Was Barack Obama particularly bad? While there were overblown accusations, such as him attempting "to destroy America as we know it," is there validity to the idea that he was putting us on a particularly terrible path?
Yes. For one thing, like I said, every time you create a new entitlement, you'll never get rid of it. He was trying to create those, and he had some success. We had stopped HillaryCare. We were not able to stop Obamacare. That's what we said at the time: You'll never get rid of it. We kept trying, but we didn't. So yes, he did put us on that bad trajectory, a bigger government than we'd had before. Although every president was giving us a bigger government than we had had before.
How did Donald Trump scramble the libertarian movement? There are people who claim that "Trump is the most libertarian president ever." What do you think people mean when they say something like that?
Yes, there were. I had lots of fights. I blocked more people that year on Facebook than ever before. I had a lot of fights with old friends who said, "He's the most libertarian president." I mean, when he was running…he said he would cut taxes. Any Republican that year would've been campaigning on tax cuts. He said he would cut regulation. He did campaign against immigration and against trade. I never did understand. I guess he said, "Drill, baby, drill." So libertarians who thought of American energy independence, or at least production, liked it.
I think a lot of libertarians, certainly a lot of conservatives, liked the fact that he fights, he stands up, he calls the left a bunch of dickheads. I think in the subsequent five years, it occurred to me that the people conservatives and some libertarians are gravitating to are not necessarily the ones who are most conservative, certainly not the ones who are making the most compelling cases; they're the ones who are the most anti-left.
Sean Hannity on Fox: He's just partisan, anti-left all the time. Tucker Carlson. Charlie Kirk with Turning Point USA. Charlie Kirk had been kind of "Free market! Socialism sucks"—that was his organization. And then he just went all in for Trump. Then I saw other people going all in for Trump. The defense of Trump now, as the most libertarian president, I think would be tax cuts, and conservative Supreme Court justices who many libertarians think are better than liberal Supreme Court justices. And they'll say deregulation. There wasn't that much deregulation, but there was less regulation than in a Democratic administration.
What's the case against President Joe Biden?
The case against Biden is he is a bankrupt spender. I think Trump may have spent more in four years than Obama did. Biden then comes in and says, "I'll see you and raise you." So there's certainly that.
The best case I heard for Trump is from one of my colleagues. He was saying, "Hillary will bring 4,000 dedicated regulators to Washington. I don't know who Trump's going to appoint—Republican hacks, [former president of the Heritage Foundation] Ed Feulner's list, his cronies—but they won't be dedicated regulators." I think that's definitely happened with Biden. He campaigned as a moderate, and compared to either [Sen.] Elizabeth Warren or Trump he seemed centrist. But he has empowered an administration that wants to regulate everything.
Some of it is woke regulation: sexual harassment on campus, hate speech, all that kind of stuff. Some of it is just pure economic regulation, and you see it every day. "The Biden administration is going to require…" "The Biden administration is going to ban…" One of the problems there, of course, is abuse of presidential power. Every time I see one of those, I'm like, "Where in the Constitution does it say the president can do that?" Of course, it doesn't anywhere.
Going back to what I said in the beginning about cosmopolitanism and tolerance: Obama comes in, campaigns. He's black; he's the first president to welcome gay people into his administration, even though he's not for gay marriage until right before the 2012 election. But he looks like somebody who believes that everybody is part of America. Trump is obviously the exact opposite of that. And with Biden, it's gone way beyond that.
Now we are looking at another Trump vs. Biden. Neither of these people, neither of these parties, are in any way committed to libertarian principles. What are libertarians to do? How do we maneuver a political landscape such as this?
That's a good question these days. Some people tried in 2016 to run a presidential ticket composed of two governors, Gary Johnson and Bill Weld, both well-respected, against the two worst candidates in history, and they got three and a half percent of the vote. That didn't seem to work out very well.
Now the Libertarian Party has fallen apart, so they're not going to do that. I guess you have to pick the party you believe in. I would love to see a fiscally conservative, socially liberal centrist party. I do believe there are millions of voters who think that way, maybe a plurality of voters who think that way. But the two parties are controlled by, more or less, their extremes, and how do you break into that? My [former] colleague Andy Craig has thought a lot about election reforms. I never thought much about them. I always figured if there's enough libertarians, they'll make themselves felt within whatever political system. But maybe something like ranked choice voting, not so much that it would help libertarians, but that it might hurt extremists and get more of a consensus candidate.
And hey, when I was a young guy, I didn't ever think I'd be looking for a consensus centrist country.
Although we are more free as individuals, certainly to express ourselves and to live the way we want to, many don't really feel that way. Can you talk about a culture of libertarian freedom and cosmopolitanism, and how it aligns to our contemporary experiences?
I think that's partly because people always have this nostalgia. On Twitter, there's all these things: "Remember when a man with one income could afford this house?" Then economists come along and say, "Adjust for inflation and adjust for house size and things, this is not true." Plus you have all the knowledge in the history of the world in your pocket right now. Nobody had that. David Rockefeller didn't have it in 1990.
Part of it is just that we always look back and think, "Oh, things were better and now they're worse." But I do think a lot of people know they're freer because they're black people who are allowed to aspire to things. I'll tell you, when Karine Jean-Pierre was appointed press secretary, I wrote a blog post and said, "This is a sign of progress. A black lesbian could not have been the president's press secretary even maybe five or 10 years ago. This is a sign that we're a more open and accepting society." And I got a lot of blowback from alleged libertarians saying, "She's an affirmative action appointee. You're endorsing diversity, affirmative action." I said, "Look, I don't know if she'll be any good, but I'll tell you this: There are positions in your administration you would put diversity hires in, I don't believe you make the most visible face in your administration an affirmative action hire. It's important how she speaks on behalf of your administration. Whether she's good or not, I don't know, but I think they think she is."
We see more black people, more women being able to rise in corporations and politics. And of course, as a gay person in high school in the '60s, now living in a world where I can live with a longtime partner and my friends can get married, all of this is pretty much taken for granted, even among conservatives.
There's a huge surge in illiberalism both on the left and on the right. Where is that coming from, and where does that leave libertarianism?
That's a good question. I've been writing about this, not so much about libertarianism, but about liberalism. We live in a liberal world. Brian Doherty wrote in his history of the libertarian movement [Radicals for Capitalism], "a world that…runs on approximately libertarian principles." You look at that first and say, "What?" And then you think, "Well, yes, the United States, Europe, and more parts of the world are generally based on free markets and private property, and on free speech and freedom of religion, and expanding human rights to people to whom they were denied." All of that is basic libertarian principles.
OK, we're arguing about gay marriage, and OK, we spend too much money. There's all those things, but we do live in a liberal world. And yet we have these big sets of illiberals on both left and right, in the United States, and in other countries, in countries like Hungary and Turkey and India. We're moving away. It's not just Russia, China, Mexico.
My question is: Liberalism works so well! Have you looked around? Do you realize what your grandparents, your great-grandparents had, even your parents? My parents had a black and white TV for a long time. I have four televisions in my house of two people.
A critique of liberalism is that while it gives material resources, it lacks deeper meaning. Critics say it does not reward true believers with a unifying faith, goal, God, or mission. Is this a legitimate critique of liberalism?
To some extent, yes, it's a legitimate critique. Liberalism is a philosophy of individual autonomy. No established church, no established ideas. [Chinese Communist Party leader] Mao [Zedong] said, "Let a thousand ideas bloom," but liberalism actually did that. It's a significant critique, but it's a good thing. We should defend the liberalism that allows people to find meaning in their own lives. Preachers and teachers and authors may want to help guide people to find meaning in their own lives, but we're not all going to find the same meaning. What we want is people being able to choose their own churches, or no church, choose their own ideas and so on. We don't want the church, the king, the Vatican, the government imposing a meaning on everybody. That's what the liberal revolution was about. It was in great part a revolution against the established churches.
There's all these illiberals on the left, there's all these illiberals on the right, and yet liberalism endures. We do mostly live in a liberal country, in a liberal world. Something is attractive enough about liberalism to resist most of these assaults. I think it is that most people, at least in the United States, do want a world of private property and free markets and free speech and human rights and freedom of abortion and women's rights and to choose jobs. They resist the real impositions.
This interview has been condensed and edited for style and clarity.
The post David Boaz: Libertarianism Is the Intellectual Core of Liberalism appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>In this week's The Reason Roundtable, editors Matt Welch, Katherine Mangu-Ward, Nick Gillespie, and Peter Suderman weigh in on the approved House bill that could potentially usher in a ban on popular social media app TikTok in the United States.
01:49—Legislation to ban TikTok
16:39—California's continued high-speed rail boondoggle
33:48—Weekly Listener Question
43:25—Elon Musk launches Starship rocket
46:31—This week's cultural recommendations
Mentioned in this podcast:
"Banning TikTok Would Give the Feds Way Too Much Power," by Robby Soave
"Algorithm Not for Sale," by Liz Wolfe
"TikTok's Opponents Want Chinese-Style Censorship in America," by Matthew Petti
"The U.S. Steel/Nippon Deal Should Be None of Joe Biden's Business," by Eric Boehm
"Hey look a new scientific book abt how TikTok is addicting kids like 'narcotics'!" writes Nick Gillespie on X, formerly Twitter
"California's High-Speed Rail Needs Another $100 Billion. That's a Great Reason Not To Build It." by Eric Boehm
"Annie Duke: Quitting Is Totally Underrated," by Nick Gillespie
"America Is Taking a High-Speed Train to Bankruptcy," by David Ditch
"How Florida Beat California to High-Speed Rail," by Natalie Dowzicky
"The Problem With the 'Abundance Agenda,'" by Christian Britschgi
"We Told You Why and How California's High-Speed Rail Wouldn't Work. You Chose Not To Listen." by Matt Welch
"The Political Class Knew California High-Speed Rail Was B.S., and Supported it Anyway," by Matt Welch
"3 Reasons Obama's High-Speed Rail Will Go Nowhere Fast," by Meredith Bragg and Nick Gillespie
"On the Passing of a Liberal Deregulator," by Matt Welch
"Learning From Kodak's Demise," by Nick Gillespie and Matt Welch
"Milton Friedman Was No Conservative," by Brian Doherty
"Jennifer Burns on Milton Friedman's Legacy," by Nick Gillespie
"Oscar-Nominated Robot Dreams Is a Gentle Animated Love Story About Dogs, Robots, and 1980s New York," by Peter Suderman
Send your questions to roundtable@reason.com. Be sure to include your social media handle and the correct pronunciation of your name.
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The post The CCP Sucks. So Does Banning TikTok. appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>Pano Kanelos is the president of the University of Austin, which will be admitting its first class of 100 students this fall. The college was founded in 2021 as an antidote to left-wing monoculture in academia and is committed to free speech and the pursuit of truth. Reason's Nick Gillespie spoke with Kanelos, a Shakespeare scholar and first-generation college kid who grew up in a Greek diner in Chicago, about how the University of Austin will be different from virtually every other college around, why the humanities have virtually disappeared from higher education, and how a chance encounter with Nobel laureate Saul Bellow changed his life. He also does a quick, improvised close reading of the poem "Ovid in the Third Reich," by Geoffrey Hill, one of his major intellectual influences.
The post Pano Kanelos: 'Ideology Is the Death of Ideas' appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>Did you know that a mere 44,000 votes spread across Georgia, Arizona, and Wisconsin kept Joe Biden and Donald Trump from an Electoral College tie in 2020? That was even tighter than in 2016, when 80,000 votes in three states gave Trump a decisive Electoral College win.
Patrick Ruffini is a Republican pollster at Echelon Insights and author of Party of the People: Inside the Multiracial Populist Coalition Remaking the GOP. Reason's Nick Gillespie talked with Ruffini about why the major parties continue to leak market share, why 2024 is going to be another super-close presidential race, and whether small-l libertarian voters will make the difference in November.
This interview has been condensed and edited for style and clarity.
Nick Gillespie: What's the elevator pitch for your book, Party of the People: Inside the Multiracial Populist Coalition Remaking the GOP?
Patrick Ruffini: I think that it's no secret to anyone that there have been quite a few changes in our politics over the last decade or so. Specifically, a lot of those involve changes in who's voting for the parties and, fundamentally, who the parties are for. What do they seem to stand for? I go back to my early days in politics, which were at the tail end of an era in which Democrats were primarily pitching themselves to voters and receiving the votes of people who were in the working class. They really seemed to hold the moral high ground when it came to issues of who's really going to care about someone like me, an average person in this country. And [Democrats] would routinely pillory Republicans as the party of the rich, as the party of the well-to-do, the disconnected elite.
I think what we've seen is that has largely flipped. Specifically, it flipped after 2016, when Democrats really seemed to [begin to] have a lot of trouble holding on to the broad mass of working-class voters, which are today defined as voters without college degrees. Sixty-four percent of voters do not have college degrees. We obviously saw in 2016 how they lost some of those blue wall states—Michigan, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin—largely because Trump was able to appeal to this electorate in a way that no Republican had before and flipped states that no Republican had won since 1988.
Gillespie: Early on in the book, you write, "I had egg on my face in 2016." Can you talk a little bit about why you had egg on your face? Of course, it wasn't just you. It's virtually all pollsters, strategists, and activists.
Ruffini: The presumption, I think, heading into the 2016 election was that Trump was a sure loser in the election. If not in the Republican primary, then he's a sure loser in the general election. There is always a question of, "Will he succeed in this hostile takeover of the Republican Party?" Initially, I was skeptical, but not long after, it was very clear he was the odds-on favorite because he had really captured a large chunk of the electorate. Everyone else was squabbling for scraps at the table. Even if only at 35 percent, no one else was higher than 10 percent, practically speaking, at the time. But the idea was [that] maybe he can win the Republican nomination, but he's a sure loser in the general election based on just his off-color commentary, his unhinged rally speeches. Everything that was really conventional wisdom among political observers in 2016 [pointed to] a Trump victory—a victory of somebody who just flouted political norms as he did—being flat out unthinkable.
I was part of that conventional wisdom. Hillary Clinton seemed to be doing herself no favors. I didn't completely discount that. A lesson that I learned after that is voters also don't really care about the integrity of political norms as a whole. There are some segments of voters that absolutely deeply care about them. But in terms of the center of the electorate, I don't think most voters are saying, "Oh, politics is this noble thing that Donald Trump is degrading." I think they see politics as something that's down and dirty, dishonest, corrupt in large measure. Lots of people see it that way.
Gillespie: It's an interesting kind of issue, because one of the reasons why Hillary Clinton was so vulnerable was because she was seen as almost uniquely corrupt and in bed with all sorts of bad interests.
Ruffini: The idea is that for people like me who work in politics, and particularly for a political class, that are just trying to see the people we work with as basically well-intentioned people who are trying to make a positive difference for the country—it turns out just very few people actually see it that way. And Hillary Clinton was absolutely somebody who was painted that way.
I write about the parallels between Trump and Bill Clinton. Because Bill Clinton too was kind of viewed as this unsavory, seedy type of figure during his campaigns and his presidency. He was Slick Willy. He could get away with anything. In the same way, Trump was somebody who maybe had disreputable things, both that he had said and that he had done in his past, and he always seemed to evade accountability. I think that there's something to the idea that you can succeed in this environment if people view you as sort of being authentically that rascally, scoundrel-like figure who is in some way honest with voters about what they're getting. It's when you've got people who are trying to portray themselves as Boy Scouts and Girl Scouts and then don't live up to that image, that they get in trouble.
Gillespie: Trump, the billionaire who was born with a silver spoon in his mouth and was a TV star, was talking about the forgotten man. He spoke for the forgotten man. Whereas Biden—who is not working class—talked about [the working class] incessantly and coming from Scranton, Pennsylvania, etc. He's dumped a ton of money into the country, but that doesn't seem to be resonating with voters, does it?
Ruffini: I think it's ultimately who does the working class identify with? Somebody who is not fundamentally a creature of Washington, D.C., and not fundamentally a creature of this dirty, unsavory political game—I think that's what they saw in Trump. They saw a certain authenticity, and they saw somebody who spoke like them, somebody who was angry at the same people that they were angry at. I think that carried the day, ultimately.
Gillespie: It's worth pointing out that he squeaked into office with a historically low popular vote. Clinton in '92 got in with a smaller amount, and about the same amount or a little bit more in '96.
I want to zero in on what working class means. Biden carried voters who made less than $50,000. He carried households making between $50,000 to $100,000. Trump took those making over $100,000. What you say in the book is that the key divide is education, and maybe also geography, instead of economic class. It's socioeconomic status or education level. How is that functioning differently than just the amount of money that a household is bringing it?
Ruffini: It's true that at some level, the amount of money that you have in your bank account does actually dictate a lot about the way you view the world. There may still be some truth to that.
But the point I'm making is that, in terms of what manifests politically and what we're seeing happen politically in the country, education is by far the better variable that predicts everything that's happened, and particularly what's happened among white voters. So I put in the book the caveat that non-white voters don't necessarily act the same way in terms of there not being a class divide. There's more of a different pattern of behavior.
Gillespie: What percentage of the electorate is white? Is it still a vast majority?
Ruffini: In 2024, it's mid-70 percent.
Gillespie: So votes by white Americans are going to comprise the vast majority of ballots cast.
Ruffini: I would say whatever 70 percent is, if it's the vast majority, but it's still a pretty strong majority. But increasingly that white vote does not really behave as a unit, does not really matter in terms of anything politically. You're really talking about white voters without a college degree and white voters with a college degree, that used to be back in the '90s very similar in how they voted. You could kind of talk about there being a "white vote" in the 1990s. Today, you can't talk about it that way. The 40 percent of voters are going to be white non-college and the 30 percent of voters who are going to be white with a college degree. Those used to vote very similarly, and are [now] 40 points apart on the margin in who they're voting for.
Gillespie: Then you talk about the distinction between cosmopolitans and traditionalists. What does that mean?
Ruffini: It maps pretty cleanly onto this idea of white college, white non-college. I'm really interested in where things are moving. Because even though, as you cited some statistics, Biden is still winning some of those lower income voters, but what's happening there is that you still have quite a few low income minority voters in that pool of people. So Biden wins. But that gap between sort of the low income and high income voters, it is nowhere near where it was in 1996, 2000—it's just a completely different ballgame there.
When I say that, it means, who is a group of voters that is uniquely motivated by these sort of more abstract ideals of protecting democratic norms? Those are the same groups of voters, who live in cities, embrace ideas about diversity, are just generally more progressive or liberal in their outlook, but are uniquely motivated by these questions of social equality.
Then you've got a large group of voters that are not motivated by those issues. They're either motivated on the other side by a more traditional cosmopolitan view. But when it comes to some of these minority voter communities that still vote Democratic, what you find is, they are very much the conservative wing of the Democratic Party in terms of their views on social issues. They don't really place any sort of prioritization on these animating issues behind the Democratic coalition today on this Dobbs [v. Jackson Women's Health Organization] and Democracy message. Their allegiance to the Democratic Party is more historic. It was rooted in this identity of the Democratic Party as the party of the working class, of the marginalized minority communities.
Gillespie: So as the faces of the Democratic Party become more of a multiracial coalition or a rainbow coalition, they are actually losing touch with the very people they claim to be representing more directly?
Ruffini: In the revealed preferences of voters, what you actually don't find is either Hispanic or Latino voters being motivated by identity politics. In 2016, you had Trump throw every insult in the book at Mexicans, saying they're rapists, bringing crime, drugs over the border. He didn't really seem to lose a whole lot of Latino support. I mean, you would think he would. Similarly, you had Trump after the [Black Lives Matter] protests in 2020 sort of behaving badly in that context, saying that police should shoot looters and all those things. He gained support among black voters in 2020. The revealed preferences of these voters are not that they are uniquely motivated by this kind of racial identity rhetoric that is coming from the left.
Gillespie: How much of the swing from Democrats to Republicans is Trump appealing to people? How much of it is Democrats not addressing people whose votes they're taking for granted?
Ruffini: Absolutely, you can't write Donald Trump out of the story completely. You have a catalyst for the shifts we've seen. It appears that he's obviously very, very highly likely to be the Republican nominee. When you look at polling for 2024, we're seeing a further shift of African-American and Latino voters in his direction. In fact, that's most of the gains that he's been getting in the polls. To the extent that those partly materialize in 2024, what I think we're going to see is this realignment that he helped bring into being. The question is what happens if and when Donald Trump fades from the scene, and whether or not we believe we will see some sort of return to the old coalition line, to a more Romney 2012-style coalition.
The entire history of our politics suggests that that's not going to happen. I think you'll see some mean reversion. I think if Nikki Haley were the nominee—very unlikely to happen—you'd certainly see her do better in the suburbs. You'd probably see her frankly do better overall in the election. Not quite as polarizing a figure, but I don't think you would ever see a return back. And there's a good reason for that. That's because this kind of thing is happening throughout Western democracies, where the working class sort of is aligning itself more and more with the parties of the right. The more highly educated voters are aligning themselves more and more with parties on the left. Those countries don't necessarily have a Donald Trump. But this does seem to be something that is naturally occurring—was to some extent occurring before Donald Trump. So I don't think it's exclusively on him, but he was a catalyst for accelerating.
Gillespie: Is any of this generational in nature? Overwhelmingly younger people voted for Democrats, at least in presidential elections.
Ruffini: This is a big issue. This is a big debate right now. Are you actually going to see people as they grow older becoming more conservative? That's what we've seen in generations past. But there's a lot of discussion that millennials aren't quite following that same trajectory. Partly the big generational divide that I really talk about is that we now have an electorate that is entirely passed through the education sorting machine, in terms of when they were coming up and they were young, they had the opportunity to go to college or not go to college, and that was a legitimate choice, as opposed to maybe for those in the silent generation where most people just didn't go to college.
As a result, you've just got much more education polarization because more people have made the decision. If you have made that decision, "Yeah, I'm going to leave my hometown and kind of not pursue knowledge and, maybe move to a big city after college and really be part of this knowledge economy," that's just fundamentally a different kind of person than the person who stays closer to the people in places they knew growing up. I think that's part of the generational story.
I also think the generational story can't be separated from the question of race, because you just have a younger generation that is much, much more diverse. The silent generation and boomers are just much more white. You actually do see that they are more liberal and traditionally have been much more liberal as a result in the younger generation. But it's really a function of race, I think that that's true. I write about the ways that's changing.
I don't really tackle this question of generations directly because I do think it's downstream of race. I think that to the extent that younger Hispanics are not tied to the voting patterns of their parents, younger African Americans are not tied to the same voting patterns of their parents—what you're actually going to see is more of them voting Republican. You see it as a whole, diverse, younger generation that is going to be more politically balanced.
Gillespie: You point out the fact that the country is more mixed than ever. There is a huge amount of what would count by various measures as desegregation going on—younger generations, millennials, and Gen-Z are more multi-ethnic. How do you consider yourself, if let's say, you're a third-generation Puerto Rican who married an Asian woman, then you divorce them and marry a black person? What are your kids? I think we're seeing an attempt to kind of keep two or three categories intact when the social reality is just vastly outstripping that.
Ruffini: As of today, the number of voters who are genuinely more than one race—it's actually a pretty small number. But when you look at the children born in the United States, one in five children being born today are of some kind of mixed racial background, and that doesn't even count Hispanics, because we don't have a really good way of actually accounting for Hispanics because of the way the census collects data.
I do think that this assumption we've had about non-white groups being a loyal Democratic bloc, especially within the African-American community, was predicated on the idea that this was a marginalized, discriminated-against group that needed to organize under the banner of one political party to advance their interests. What happens when that identity is no longer salient? That identity of, "I don't view myself as a victim." I don't view myself as somebody who is going to be discriminated against as a result of my skin color, and that's just fundamentally not who I am. I am many different things. I am potentially of many different races. But I also live in a suburb with people of all different sorts of racial and ethnic backgrounds. I think that's fundamentally, in one way or the other, just going to change voting patterns over time.
Gillespie: The idea that Trump actually was getting more minority votes than somebody like a Mitt Romney or a John McCain…What was the swing in black support for Trump? It's still low, even historically going back to somebody like [Dwight D.] Eisenhower. But what's the swing? What are the issues that black voters—if we can talk about a median black vote—care about?
Ruffini: There's different data sources on this. If you look at precinct data, there's something like a 5 to 6 point swing on the margin from a very low base. But that means in some cases, you had precincts where there were literally zero voters and they go to, all right, maybe Trump gets five voters or ten voters in 2016 or 2020.
Gillespie: But he did particularly well among black men, right?
Ruffini: Yeah. In general, you've seen a little bit of recovery and some other data sources have it as much as 10 or 12 points among black voters, from 2016 to 2020, when you had a swing of about 18 points among Hispanic voters. So you're right. That was something that kind of blew my mind too early on. But when you kind of start to see that this is actually part of the same trend of white working class voters. The vast majority of Hispanic and African-American people in this country are working class in terms of not having a college degree. It's a part of the working class shift more broadly, even as college educated shifted to Democrats, the non-college educated are shifting Republican. I do think that that has been the shift.
I think that particularly Trump—a lot of it goes back to his personal demeanor, which I think if you talk to people along the coast, people like us would say that's a liability. But it turns out that's not a liability to a lot of people in the country. In fact, it's something that attracts a lot of people to him, including some unexpected voters. So when it comes to, again, these younger minority men, who I think are a key group, kind of heading into this election cycle, who themselves speak pretty bluntly and forthrightly, this idea of somebody who does not necessarily adhere to the genteel mannerisms of political discourse is, on balance, more appealing than somebody who does.
Gillespie: If Trump's appeal to blacks is growing and that's partly powered by an appeal to non-college-educated black men who like blunt speaking, what is it with Hispanics?
Ruffini: I think number one, it's the economy. This is an upwardly mobile, striving community. It's a community where that old historic pattern of if you have more money, if you've made it in the country, you actually are voting more Republican. It just turns out there's a pretty good upward trajectory and upward trend in Hispanic incomes over the last few generations. You actually do see a lot more loyalty to the Democratic Party in the sort of lower income first generation communities that you see moved to second and third generation communities.
Gillespie: As you point out in your book, your name ends in a vowel. It is Italian. I am Italian on my mother's side, who grew up in Waterbury, Connecticut, not far from where you grew up. Michael Barone, 25 years ago wrote The New Americans: How the Melting Pot Can Work Again, and likened the Mexican-American experience to the Italian-American experience. Part of his argument was that two or three generations in, they are indistinguishable from native-born people.
Yet we fail to grasp that because Latino or Hispanic immigrants keep coming to the country. We keep thinking everybody is here for six months or a couple of years. And we don't recognize that since Reagan's second administration, if not longer, Latinos, particularly Mexicans, have been here, and now they're in their second or third generation. So they're really as American as Italians, right?
Ruffini: That's right. I think there's a big divide by generation in terms of partisanship. But you mentioned that the group is not a monolith. There's no shared unique experience among Latinos in America. You've got Mexican Americans, got Puerto Ricans, got Cuban Americans. All the different [groups] came from incredibly different contexts. When you look at the issue of why does Trump actually make gains after he elevates the issue of immigration? It's because Hispanics who are already in the voting public, do they see the people coming across the border today as people like them or do they see them as fundamentally different from them? I think they see them as more different than they do similar. If you're voting and if you show up in these election statistics that I talk about, you've probably been here for a while. You're a citizen of the United States. You are a legal immigrant to the United States, if you have immigrated at all to the United States. It's just a fundamentally different experience.
In particular in the polling, in the work I've done on the southern border, it's very clear that the people down there do not see the people crossing as being one of them, especially in the current wave. What you see also increasingly is, the people here in those communities tend to be more Mexican-American. And what you see is people from Venezuela, but you're also seeing non-Latino people crossing. You're seeing people from Haiti, the Caribbean and further afield, who are part of this migrant crisis. It's just fundamentally different. A typical Latino voter is as far apart from the people crossing today than a typical white. And that's the reality.
Gillespie: Has immigration been defined by the chaos at the border or the inability to control the border?
Ruffini: There is no question that this situation on the southern border has overshadowed and dominated the whole question of immigration, such that when you even bring up the question of immigration in this survey, people see it as an issue that is a liability for the Biden administration. People want to go back to something like the Trump administration policies. But you did see increasingly, post-2016, there was a backlash among Democrats to what was seen as Trump's xenophobia, intolerance of immigrants, and so they, as a result, putting on their jerseys to some extent, decided to be a party that was openly advocating for immigration, whereas you wouldn't have seen that in the Democratic Party of yesteryear, which was where labor was a big factor. Labor, in and of itself through the 1990s, was very skeptical of open immigration.
I think that the old populist Democratic Party went away. As a result, Biden had to commit to a much more open set of border policies that has invited political disaster for him.
Gillespie: At the same time, Bill Clinton in '96 spent a huge chunk of his renomination speech saying he was going to get rid of illegal immigrants. He was going to remove them from the country.
Ruffini: That is a really good point. I think there's a world of difference between Bill Clinton and what Joe Biden is going to do. You don't really see Biden touting the fact that he is now tough on the border, like he is the one who was tough and wants to get something done on the border, in such a way that it would register with voters.
The other day on Twitter, I imagined, what would a Bill Clinton-style ad look like about the current border crisis? I know he'd be talking about the Biden border plan to crack down on illegals. If you were rerunning the Bill Clinton 1996 playbook, which, by the way, I think that would work, I think that would still work today. But you won't see him do it because the climate within his own party has just dramatically changed when it comes to anything that's adjacent to diversity or anything like that. It's just unimaginable that he would do something like that.
Gillespie: Let's talk about Asian Americans. How do they factor into the multiracial coalition that might remake the GOP? How bad is it to characterize all Asian Americans as peas in a pod? But then what is the highest-salience set of issues for them?
Ruffini: This is a very bifurcated community because about half of the Asian electorate is college-educated and votes in many ways similar to the white, college-educated electorate. You have a large number of Asians in California, which is a very blue state. They started out from a very democratic baseline. But if you look at the Asian American professionals in one of the major metro areas, they're pretty indistinguishable, actually, from a white educated professional.
In terms of the places where you have an identifiably Asian voting bloc—places like Little Saigon in Orange County or in San Jose, California, or places in Queens, which have received a lot of attention over the last couple election cycles—those are oftentimes first generation immigrant communities where a lot of people speak the original language. These voters are very different from this professional class that you've seen a shift in? You actually start to see more of a class divide in the Asian community.
But you look at places like in New York City—and particularly this realignment kind of gained steam in 2022—[former Rep.] Lee Zeldin [R–N.Y.] won a lot of those voters. You had three Asian American Republicans getting elected as Assembly people in Brooklyn, when no one was really expecting that. It is a very different community. You really see it particularly among Koreans, among Vietnamese, to some extent Chinese Americans. Less so among Indian Americans, I don't think you see it as much there. But there's a huge divide by education.
Gillespie: What about groups like Chinese and Japanese, who might be a very small population? Do you see the same kind of pattern where if they've been here for three generations or more they have become indistinguishable from white voters or native-born Americans?
Ruffini: It depends on the context of what are they moving to. To some extent, the Hispanic working-class voter is essentially this generation's version of the white working-class voter of yesteryear. They're moving into places like Northeast Philly, which was a traditionally more conservative place. We had a pretty conservative white electorate. But they're living a solidly middle-class existence. This is not like, "Oh, we're living in the barrio." We are living a solidly middle-class existence. There's a pathway where you can see how they're becoming more Republican.
Look at the Asian American voter. It's a little bit more complicated because you mentioned The New Americans by Michael Barone, where he drew these parallels. The parallel he draws with Asians, is if Hispanics were the new Italians, Asians are the new Jews, in terms of they seem to be a very highly educated group, with very high levels of educational attainment, very high levels of rising up the income ladder, almost in a very steep pattern where they're leapfrogging every other group. There is a sense that that has led to a more Democratic outlook among a newer generation or people entering the professional class. You see that more and more among Asian voters.
But to some extent, the Democratic Party has spurned the Asian American vote. The progressive movement has spurned the Asian-American voter in the push for diversity, ironically, in higher education, where it's really Asian-Americans who are the losers. If you de-emphasized merit in higher education—I'd love to see your Republicans actually do more to seize upon that issue in Asian communities.
Gillespie: We all know that the 2016 election was unbelievably close. It was as tight as it could get. But in 2020, Joe Biden won overwhelmingly in the popular vote as a percentage and in the Electoral College. But how close was that election? Was it a blowout, or was it actually pretty close to 2016 when you factor in things?
Ruffini: I'm smiling because actually the perception that it wasn't a close election, it's just completely wrong. It's actually, technically speaking, closer than 2016 when you look at the number of votes needed to have flipped in the Electoral College. People forget how close Trump came to winning the election—just a shift of 0.7 percent in the popular vote spread uniformly across the country would have won. That means he would have been the president, squeaking by with 6 million fewer popular votes than Biden. Why is that? Partly it's due to this working-class coalition.
The working class is concentrated in states that are more just electorally significant to the outcome of the election. Part of the reason that this realignment really is the best avenue and bet for Republicans to win elections moving forward is because they're overrepresented in the electoral college. Now, we'll see if that happens again in 2024. But, it was a very, very close election, and particularly compared to the polls going into the election, which Biden I think was up by eight points in the last polling average. He only wins by four and barely squeaks by in a way that allows Trump to make an argument to his voters that it was stolen from him.
Gillespie: Do you believe that or are you saying that Trump made that argument?
Ruffini: No, I don't believe it was stolen from him. But I do think that had we seen Biden actually win the election by as much as he should have won the election, as much as polls were saying, and was expected to win the election, then I think Trump would have just had a much harder time convincing people.
Gillespie: Assuming the 2024 election is Trump vs. Biden and assuming each of them is brain damaged in their own unique, special ways, is it totally up for grabs?
Ruffini: I think that it would be. It's a fair assumption about any election, no matter what the polls say at this point. You start from the prior that it's a jump ball. But, it's a very different election right now. Right now, Trump is polling ahead and that's been very consistent, no matter what the economic numbers seem to do. I don't think you could ignore that. It's not a fundamentally different election from the standpoint of pre-election polling than it was in 2020. That said, I think we will likely still see a very, very close election. But, right now, Trump seems to be doing a lot better than he was at this point in 2020.
Gillespie: The economy compared to 2020 is doing relatively well. Inflation was a big issue then. Despite Biden being terrible on the economy, things for most people are doing pretty well. Is that because voters don't really care about the actual reality?
Ruffini: I wouldn't say the results are reality and the ground doesn't matter. If the economic situation kind of quiets down, he'd rather have that than the alternative. But a perception has set in particularly as it relates to Biden's fitness and his age that is very hard to recover from, unless something dramatic happens, either in the form of a Trump conviction or in the form of Trump has his own health crisis, that does seem to be something that is weighing down Biden pretty heavily, independently of the state of the economy. But also just a pretty deep-seated perception that the grass was greener on the other side of the street.
Even if Biden is able to somehow recover on the economy, and maybe make it a little bit more of a draw, does he still win the debate with Trump over who best is able to manage the economy? They still win that retrospective look back, I was better off. The perception that set in, that things were at least under control on the global stage when Trump was president, I seem to be making more money.
Gillespie: Towards the end of your book Party of the People, you say, "I come to tell the younger me that the libertarian dream of smaller government is debt." You also talk a fair amount when you're looking at the future of politics about a quadrant chart that Lee Trotman put together, which shows that what used to be called the libertarian quadrant—the shorthand is fiscally conservative, socially liberal—there are no voters there. How do you justify that?
Ruffini: That's something your colleague Stephanie Slade tackled very aptly in a feature piece at Reason recently. Growing up, I very much drank the Kool-Aid, supply-side economics and a lot of, not just maybe a more libertarian economics, but the whole Reagan view of, let's say, limited government. The reality is that not a lot of voters are motivated by those sorts of questions in the real world. You see both parties increasingly motivated on cultural questions and activated on cultural questions. That's particularly true of Republican voters, and particularly around the issue of immigration. We saw that very clearly with Trump in 2016. I also don't think that a whole lot of voters are motivated by a left-wing ideological critique of the Reagan era or support for social democracy.
I think that the questions that actually motivate voters on a real level are fundamentally different from the ones that motivate activists, and the ones that motivate people like me growing up—we're very invested in these economic ideologies. Trump really kind of pulled that back and said this isn't really at a fundamental gut level what's moving people, even though they do have. I write this in the book that it's not like Republicans should just become a party that supports social programs, and that's how you win working-class voters. They do have this gut-level identification with capitalist or free enterprise, or business and hard work as a way of working your way up. But they're just not quite as invested in reading Milton Friedman as maybe that younger version of me was thinking.
Gillespie: If the Republican Party no longer seems to be courting libertarians in a way that they were at the end of the aughts to the beginning of the 2000 teens, it doesn't mean that libertarian voters have disappeared. Emily Ekins and David Boaz at the Cato Institute, using various measures that are alternative to some of the ones that you and Lee Trotman use, hypothesize that 10 percent to 20 percent of voters pretty reliably vote socially liberal and fiscally conservative.
Where do those voters go, assuming they're not completely just making that up? In an election like the one that we're going to have now, in an election like in 2022 or 2016, where are those libertarian voters and who do you think they would be going for in something like this?
Ruffini: You're right that even if a group is smaller in the electorate, it turns out they matter quite a lot. And I think Joe Biden doesn't win in 2020 without all the third party voters from 2016 who primarily backed him. But when you talk about how we define that socially, more moderate, or liberal and fiscally conservative voter, I think we are used to viewing that libertarian vote as adjacent to the Republican vote. As something that belongs to Republicans. What we'll be actually seeing more and more is more of a crossover between libertarians and Democrats recently. Because those cultural issues seem to be the tie-breaker. They seem to matter more.
Number one, Trump isn't fiscally conservative. He's not really standing up for that side of the argument. But you also just see social issues and cultural issues kind of matter more. I'm not talking about the hardcore Libertarian Party voter, I am talking about that sort of voter in the northeast corridor, that likes to say they're socially more moderate and fiscally conservative. What you've seen more recently, in a more recent election cycle is that those voters go more Democratic. Whereas that moderate voter again, that's the Obama-Trump voter. That's the voter in Michigan. That's the old autoworker. That's pro-life. They see a role for the government in the economy. Those voters have been moving in completely the opposite directions.
Gillespie: What are the signs to look for going into the election, and then after that will there be a long-lived realignment of the parties?
Ruffini: We don't necessarily know after 2024 if this new coalition survives. Certainly, there's a case for the shifts that we've seen, particularly as it relates to non-white voters continuing, you're seeing that in the polls right now. There's also a case to be made that this is more of a long-term process. In the book, I write about looking ahead. Let's actually conduct a thought experiment that if this actually happens, what does 2036 look like? What would the election of 2036 look like?
Overwhelmingly, because we have a pretty good idea of what the demographics are going to be in that year. We know the country is just getting more non-white. What would the breakdown need to look like? It would need to look something like this: Republicans draw pretty even among Hispanics, they're winning about maybe 40 percent of Asian voters, and they're winning almost a quarter of the African-American vote. What's interesting is there's polls out there that show that's happening in 2024. It could be that I'm way too conservative. But I think you really have to view this over a long-term trajectory and not election to election, which is very noisy. I think that subject to all sorts of factors that are specific to the cycle.
Right now we have this tendency to view Ronald Reagan as this golden era of Republican normalcy, as somebody who is moderate on immigration and for free trade and for internationalism and global leadership. Certainly, that's true, but I think it understates the extent to which Reagan himself was a disruptive figure in the Republican Party in the '70s and '80s, where he was fundamentally—in the same way Trump is disrupting the existing Republican order—disrupting challenger Gerald Ford from the right. As a result, the party moves, the party shifts, and it becomes a really unambiguously conservative party after Reagan.
In some way, I think the party will become an unambiguously more populist party. Now, whether or not we have somebody who is quite as much of an avatar of that as Donald Trump in the future, I'm not sure. I think he is somewhat sui generis. I think you will, by default, have somebody more "normal" in the future, particularly someone who can get elected president. But, I think that just the baseline has shifted. It shifted with Reagan and I think it's now shifted with Trump.
Gillespie: Where do you think the Democratic Party is shifting to? Are they undergoing a similar process, if they are now appealing to educated cosmopolitan voters?
Ruffini: It's a coalition that is shifted in terms of the voters it's appealed to significantly. It's really openly making the case on cultural issues, openly making the case for a more open society, really talking up these sort of more abstract concepts of democracy as opposed to the kind of campaign we saw as recently as 2012 when Obama was railing against Mitt Romney as the scion of private equity. You didn't care about people like you. You just don't seem to see that kind of rhetoric anymore, even though that remains part of the party's policy commitment. I don't necessarily think they're going to go conservative on economic issues.
Gillespie: Medicare and Social Security appear to be completely inviolate at this point. It is beyond the third rail of American politics now. To even invoke it, other than to say you are going to keep it forever and maybe make it shinier, is complete political death. Is there any way that that's going to change?
Ruffini: What's going to change, if nothing else, are the actuarial realities of these programs that are going to impose upon everybody's tidy the political notions and ideas. What you would say now is that it is absolute political death for anybody to touch that entitlement reform. Particularly when you frame the question as cuts to entitlement programs. I think you're absolutely passing that rubicon of we're no longer able to pay out benefits at the state level. It's going to fundamentally be another major disruption, akin to but somewhat I think much greater than what we saw in the last three years with 20 percent inflation. I think that that is going to be in and of itself going to upend a lot of our politics.
But, Trump intuited, not incorrectly, that this was not a political winner for Republicans and he was actually willing to—and I think probably others had intuited that beforehand—make the argument, which have made it overall very much more difficult for any political party that is calling out for some kind of solution.
Gillespie: Are there new ways to talk about entitlement spending that casts it in a more populist sensibility, because it's clear that Social Security and Medicare both take money from relatively young people and relatively poor people and give it to relatively old and relatively rich people. Former Speaker of the House Paul Ryan failed because he didn't make the commercial throwing grandma off a cliff. He should have owned that and said,
we need to do this, and she wants that for us anyway."
Ruffini: It's fundamentally different for a lot of people. You'll have Hispanic voters really voicing the sentiment around, "We don't want welfare cheats." And frankly, that's a real, palpable sentiment. They completely exclude Social Security and Medicare from that calculation.
Whereas for a lot of people, when people take offense to the idea that these are quote-unquote entitlements—aka welfare programs—when the technical definition of an entitlement is you're entitled to it because you theoretically paid into it. Fundamentally, this is actually the political consensus in the working class, is anti-welfare and pro-Social Security. They're making the distinction based on the fact that they believe they paid into these programs, and they're just getting out what they have already paid in. Which is not reality, but that's a very strongly held belief.
This interview has been condensed and edited for style and clarity.
Photo Credit: Wennphotostwo121965
The post Patrick Ruffini: Why Blacks and Hispanics Are Turning to Trump appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>In this week's The Reason Roundtable, editors Matt Welch, Katherine Mangu-Ward, and Nick Gillespie welcome back sudden special guest (and former Roundtable host) Andrew Heaton! The editors reflect on President Biden's recent State of the Union address and look ahead to the unavoidable slog of eight more months of election coverage.
04:11—President Biden's feisty, yet empty, State of the Union address
24:27—Third party election outlook
46:43—Weekly Listener Question
55:49—This week's cultural recommendations
Mentioned in this podcast:
"State of the Union (on Stimulants)" by Liz Wolfe
"The State of Our Biden Is Historically Frail" by Matt Welch
"Remarks by the President in the State of the Union Address" by Joe Biden
"No Labels, With No Candidate, Says Yes to a 2024 Presidential Campaign" by Matt Welch
"Biden's Inaccurate and Inadequate Lip Service to Marijuana Reform Ignores Today's Central Cannabis Issue" by Jacob Sullum
"Biden Touts More Forever Wars, Breaking His 2021 Promises" by Matthew Petti
"Third Party Candidates Widening Trump's Lead Over Biden" by Matt Welch
"Biden's Plan To Subsidize Homebuyers Won't Work" by Christian Britschgi
"Biden Says He'll Make the Wealthy Pay More To Fix Social Security. Here's Why That Won't Work." by Eric Boehm
"Biden Is Wrong About Student Debt Forgiveness" by Emma Camp
"Not Again With the 'Shrinkflation,' Please" by Eric Boehm
"RFK Jr.: The Reason Interview" by Nick Gillespie and Zach Weissmueller
"The Limits of Taxing the Rich" by Brian Riedl
"How Long Could Billionaires Fund the Government" by Nick Gillespie and John Osterhoudt
Send your questions to roundtable@reason.com. Be sure to include your social media handle and the correct pronunciation of your name.
Check out Andrew Heaton's podcast The Political Orphanage here.
Today's sponsor:
Audio production by Ian Keyser
Assistant production by Hunt Beaty
Music: "Angeline," by The Brothers Steve
The post The State of the Union Is Shouty appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>Magatte Wade is author of the memoir and manifesto The Heart of a Cheetah: How We Have Been Lied to about African Poverty—and What That Means for Human Flourishing (Cheetah Press), in which she argues the solution to Africa's problems lies in "the cheetah generation" of young Africans who embrace free markets, individualism, human rights, and transparency in government.
Born in Senegal and now residing in Austin, Texas, Wade is director of the Center for African Prosperity at the Atlas Network and the founder and CEO of Skin Is Skin, which sells skin and lip products sourced in Africa. In December, Reason's Nick Gillespie sat down with Wade to discuss her book, entrepreneurship in Africa, and startup cities.
Q: The controlling metaphor of your book is the cheetah and the cheetah generation. Where does that term come from, and what does it signify for you?
A: The reason why I am cheetah everything is because of my beloved professor, George Ayittey, a Ghanaian economist who we lost [in 2022]. He had made this differentiation between the hippo mentality. These are the people who still believe that colonialism sets us back. People who believe that slavery, even though we're out of it, sets us back. When you put them all together, it's more or less the victimhood mentality. Because as long as we stay in victimhood, we don't try to fight more. We stay poor, and the foreign aid keeps on pouring in to fix, supposedly, that poverty. And then they are facing off with whom? The cheetah generation.
George said the cheetah generation is a generation of Africans with a mindset that really is waiting for no one. They're not going to wait for the government. They're not going to wait for foreign aid. They believe in themselves. They know they have the tools and they're just going to get it done. And he said, the future of our continent lies on the back of the cheetahs.
It's not about your age. It's not about, are you African or non-African? It's not about, are you an African living on the continent or in the diaspora? It's very much, do you believe that we have a bright future? And do you believe that that bright future will be achieved by the free market?
Q: You critique development economist Jeffrey Sachs, who helped create and push the United Nations' Millennium Development Goals. What do people like Jeffrey Sachs fundamentally get wrong? What is wrong with the framework that they are trying to impart on the developing world?
A: To me it's just not understanding the way the world works and not understanding economics. It's not really rocket science. And maybe that's why for people who are always looking for complexity, they fail to see that. I think for folks like him, there's something very unsettling about this idea that the market can take care of things.
Jeffrey Sachs thought he could fix poverty and so forth, but then what he did is basically set up a village, what they would call the millennium development villages. And there they just went on to basically do a very top-down type of approach to economics. Eventually what happened is they went nowhere and things started rotting all over the place. All of this stuff that they spent millions of dollars on. And by the way, an entrepreneur would've probably produced the same, better quality, cheaper, and still be able to sell it, but they had nothing to show for it. That's the mentality of people like that.
Q: You say Africa would benefit from millions of Africans creating businesses, becoming entrepreneurial. But you stress how hard it is within Africa to start a business.
A: Life is made of tradeoffs. But when it comes to foreign aid, I think people only look at supposedly the little wins in the tradeoffs. I had this woman, she was very upset with me. For her, she's sure the roads can only be helpful. Aren't they? You see road equals benefit. Let me talk about the costs. Because of this road, I have a culture of dependency that keeps on being ingrained in my people. That surely cannot be good for the entrepreneurial mindset that we need from them in order to really create wealth and value. A cultural dependency just doesn't go hand in hand [with economic progress].
Q: How does a road create dependence?
A: This road came because of foreign aid. Foreign aid came to us because supposedly we're poor. Our governments are literally poor. They don't have enough money to cater to all the needs of what the government would need money for.
Now, I would like to tell people, why do you think we are in that situation? Why do you think that we're poor in the first place so much that we need you to inject the additional cash so that we can build the roads that normally we should have built for ourselves with the money that we made? We are poor because we don't let our entrepreneurs work. If you just come and finance for me what I should have financed for myself and by myself and we keep doing this, nothing has changed since the end of so-called colonialism.
So for that road, I get a generation of young people behaving this way, which cannot operate in the market. For that road I also got more violence and more violence as well as leaders who never want to leave.
Q: How would startup cities help in an African context?
A: Africa is the poorest region in the world because it happens to be the most overregulated region in the world. It's the region in the world where entrepreneurs lack what entrepreneurs need the most, which is an enabling business environment.
I'm sure your audience knows how cumbersome and complicated and hard and long it takes to do piecemeal legislation and also reforms. Costly, timely, everything. We've got to accelerate. And most importantly, we have to be a little bit more radical because tweaking something here, tweaking something there is just not going to get us there. We have to do tabula rasa and just start over.
So the idea instead is how about we try to clean up one place at a time? Startup cities are these next-generation special economic zones with their own law, their own governance, especially when it comes to commercial law, and usually based on common law. That's really for me what the solution is going to be, because what you're doing all of a sudden for these African entrepreneurs who are trapped in the dysfunctional systems they're in right now, you're giving them a chance.
Q: How do you get the incumbents, the people who benefit from the status quo, to allow that kind of experimentation?
A: Why I'm so bullish on the future of Africa is because we don't need all 54 nations to go for this all at once. All I need is one nation where you have a leader who is thinking a little bit more differently than the others and also has different goals than the others because not all of them are as corrupt as we think they are. And even if they do things that are corrupt, not all of them, given a chance, want to stay in this state of misery and despair.
Startup cities are a way for these leaders to actually get their cake and eat it too. So continue doing whatever it is that you're doing over there, but over here, let's do an experiment that doesn't affect [the leaders]. There is no sovereignty being attacked. Your family laws remain the same, your immigration law remains the same, criminal law, all of that stuff remains the same. You're just saying when it comes to prosperity building, entrepreneurs need an enabling environment. So we're going to look at the commercial laws especially and make sure we give them the best environment for them to create.
This interview has been condensed and edited for style and clarity.
The post Magatte Wade on Africa, Foreign Aid, and Free Markets appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>The post Nate Silver: Libertarians Are the Real Liberals appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>In this week's The Reason Roundtable, editors Matt Welch, Katherine Mangu-Ward, Nick Gillespie, and Peter Suderman debate the pros and cons of various ideas for electoral reform ahead of this week's Super Tuesday primary contests.
00:27—The Supreme Court rules Colorado can't remove Donald Trump from the ballot.
06:19—Electoral dysfunction, incentives, plus pros and cons of various proposed reforms
36:40—Weekly Listener Question
45:48—Sen. Mitch McConnell (R–Ky.) announces his retirement.
56:06—This week's cultural recommendations
Mentioned in this podcast:
"Supreme Court Unanimously Rules That States May Not Disqualify Trump As an Insurrectionist," by Jacob Sullum
"Does Ranked Choice Voting Disenfranchise Minorities?" by Joe Lancaster
"The Modern Supreme Court Agrees With Chief Justice Chase: Trump Cannot Be Removed From the Presidential Ballot," by Josh Blackman
"Supreme Court Rules for Trump in Section 3 Disqualification Case," by Ilya Somin
"'Super' Week," by Eric Boehm
"How Ranked Choice Voting Would Sort the Republican Primary Field," by Eric Boehm
"Morris P. Fiorina: Why 'Electoral Chaos' Is Here To Stay," by Nick Gillespie
"In Alaska, Ranked Choice Voting Worked," by Eric Boehm
"Gerrymandering Is Making Elections Less Competitive," by Eric Boehm
"The Commission on Presidential Debate's 15 Percent Polling Criterion Must Go, Argues Lawsuit from Gary Johnson," by Brian Doherty
"How GOP Fiscal Sanity Died, in 7 Easy Steps," by Matt Welch
"Dune: Part Two Is a Glorious Sci-Fi Spectacle," by Peter Suderman
"The Great Gatsby's Creative Destruction," by Nick Gillespie
"Comic: Robert A. Heinlein in 'The Moon Is a Hot Babe,'" by Peter Bagge
"Robert Heinlein at 100," by Brian Doherty
"The Parables of Octavia Butler," by Amy H. Sturgis
"Science Fiction Is for Socialists?" by Katherine Mangu-Ward
"Sandra Newman: Reimagining 1984 From Julia's Perspective," by Nick Gillespie
"Science Fiction: Created Worlds," by John Pierce
"Review: Dune and The Velvet Underground," by Kurt Loder
"Herbert's Dune It Again," by Patrick Cox
"Giant Douche and Turd Sandwich Debate," by South Park Studios
"Episode 77: Nick Gillespie / The Byrds," by Scot Bertram and Jeff Blehar
Nick Gillespie's Q&A on C-SPAN
Send your questions to roundtable@reason.com. Be sure to include your social media handle and the correct pronunciation of your name.
Today's sponsor:
Audio production by Ian Keyser; assistant production by Hunt Beaty.
Music: "Angeline," by The Brothers Steve
The post Rank Choices appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>You probably already know that the national debt is bigger than our whole economy. But relax, because things can always get worse! And they will, regardless of whether Biden or Trump gets elected in the fall. Each has a proven track record of spending like a drunken sailor and most projections show that debt will grow to between 181 percent and 340 percent of GDP over the next few decades. Reason's Nick Gillespie discussed all of this and more with Brian Riedl, a budget expert at the Manhattan Institute. Riedl explains why massive and growing debt is really bad, why reducing it is really hard but really important, and why young people should be really pissed.
Today's sponsor:
Watch the full video here and find a condensed transcript below.
Gillespie: We know who the candidates are going to be. It's going to be Biden vs. Trump. They both have track records that you have been tracking as a policy analyst at the Manhattan Institute talking about debt and deficits. You, last fall, released a big book of charts and doom and deficits. The Congressional Budget Office [CBO] is projecting $119 trillion worth of deficits over the next 30 years. And that's optimistic.
You note that we have gone from the national debt being $3 trillion in the year 2000 to $27 trillion in the past quarter century. According to the CBO calculations, depending on what happens, debt will be between 181 percent and 340 percent of gross domestic product [GDP] in another 30 years. So we got a lot of debt floating around here. Why are debt and deficits bad?
Riedl: Modest and sustainable deficits are not bad. It's like any sort of borrowing. It's OK to go into debt for your mortgage. It's OK to borrow for school. I am not a balanced budget absolutist.
Every year's deficit adds up to the national debt. Modest borrowing is not bad. It doesn't raise interest rates very much. It doesn't cost taxpayers much. The problem is debt gets out of control when it grows faster than the economy forever. It's just like a family. If your debt is growing faster than your income forever, it's not sustainable. And for most of the period after World War II, the debt was about 40 percent of GDP, which most economists considered sustainable. It didn't raise interest rates very high, and the interest costs as a share of federal spending were manageable.
The problem is now we've gone from 40 percent to 100 percent, and we're going much higher. If that happens, the dangers are, in a basic macroeconomic angle, higher interest rates. Because the more savings the government borrows, the less savings are available for everyone else to borrow. And that'll bid up interest rates and reduce investment. But what becomes even a bigger issue is how Washington's even going to be able to borrow that much money. Is there enough savings for Washington to even lend? And if they are able to borrow it, are the interest costs going to be so high that we could have a situation where 50 percent or 80 percent of your federal taxes are just paying interest on the debt rather than getting anything of value?
Gillespie: What about the idea that long, persistent, and growing national debt decreases long term economic growth?
Riedl: Absolutely. Again, modest debt doesn't make much of a difference. But, if you think of it, there is a certain pool of savings in America and in the global economy. That savings usually would be borrowed for home loans, car loans, business loans, investment to grow the economy. But the more the government borrows this money, the more they soak up the savings. And instead of spending on investment, they spend it on consumption. They're going to give it to seniors to consume.
There's going to be fewer money for home loans, car loans, student loans, and business loans. Ultimately, because investment is the lifeblood that drives the economy, when you starve the economy of investment dollars, you're going to get less business investment. It's going to create fewer jobs. There's going to be lower wages and lower growth. And you could argue we've already seen this. Japan has a debt of 200 percent of GDP. Their economy has been a basket case for 30 years.
Gillespie: Both the federal government and the Federal Reserve System are ostensibly independent. They've just said, "OK, well, we're just going to keep printing money. We're going to create money out of thin air." Is that also unsustainable?
Riedl: Yes. In fact, of the growth in debt over the past decade or so, about $4 trillion to $5 trillion of it has essentially been funded by the printing press. The Federal Reserve's holding of Treasury bills, which they essentially buy with printed money, has gone up $4 trillion to $5 trillion. The Fed is actually looking to unload that $4 trillion to $5 trillion. But if they didn't, let's say they keep printing money, you're just going to get hyperinflation.
The [Modern Monetary Theory] MMT crowd says you can always just print more money and the debt goes away. You can't expand the money supply by tens of trillions of dollars without creating significant inflation. My worry is long term. There's going to be a lot of pressure in Congress to go that direction. [It's] what's called fiscal dominance, when interest rates are set more to keep borrowing costs low than to stabilize the economy. That's my worry.
Gillespie: What is driving the debt? What is driving persistent deficits?
Riedl: The debt up until now has been driven by all sorts of factors. When you go from $3 trillion to $27 trillion, there's going to be a lot of blame to go around. We've had Social Security and Medicare costs rise. There have been wars, tax cuts, just yearly runaway spending. The pandemic cost about $5 trillion. But moving forward from where we are now, there's one answer: Social Security and Medicare. Over the next 30 years, the Social Security and Medicare systems will run a shortfall of a $116 trillion.
Gillespie: As we mentioned, we're looking over the next 30 years at $119 trillion in total deficits. It's all Social Security and Medicare.
Riedl: The long term budget is roughly balanced if you take out Social Security and Medicare deficits. We do not really have a budget problem. We have a Social Security and Medicare problem.
Gillespie: In your book you mention that there are specific episodes where things cost a lot of money. It's fascinating. After 9/11, there wasn't the type of spike there was after the 2008 financial crisis. There was a massive blowout of debt finance spending. And then there was, of course, COVID. Broadly speaking from 1960 to 2022, spending was 20.4 percent of GDP.
So the government is spending 20.4 percent of the equivalent to the economy; revenue average over that same time was 17.4 percent. So that explains where we're at now. But you're saying going forward, it's going to get worse. And it's almost all because of old age entitlement.
Riedl: Right. You mentioned revenue has averaged 17.4 percent of the economy since 1960. It's projected to rise above that depending on whether or not we extend the 2017 tax cuts. Revenues are going to be 18 percent or 19 percent of the economy over the next 30 years. That's above average.
The problem is spending is going to jump all the way to 30 percent of the economy under the rosiest scenarios that the CBO can come up with. So people can have their own value judgments, like, "Well, I think revenues are lower than they should be." But if you're just looking at the moving variable driving deficits, it is 100 percent above average spending. There is no below average revenues projected for the next 30 years. We're going to have the highest sustained revenues in American history under the baseline. But it can't keep up with spending jumping 10 percent of GDP.
Gillespie: One of the things that you talk about in your book of charts—you have a piece recently at The Dispatch that talked about this—is that this is not a Republican or Democratic issue. It is both parties. How do Democrats tend to spend money? And then how do Republicans tend to spend money?
Riedl: Democrats like to do big bursts when they get a new presidency. For instance, Barack Obama came in, spent trillions of dollars on stimulus, then did Obamacare. The next year, you get this big burst of activity. And then it was similar with Joe Biden. Biden comes in, spends $4.8 trillion in new legislation in 20 months, which is remarkable.
Gillespie: And as remarkable as that is, he came in promising $11 trillion in new spending. So he got halfway there.
Riedl: He got halfway there in 20 months. And, who knows, had the Democrats had a good election year in Congress, they could have gone further. Democrats not only do these bursts, but Democrats also are the defenders of the status quo with entitlement costs. The quiet driver of deficits is Social Security and health care costs rising 6 percent or 7 percent a year. And Democrats are the adamant party that says we can never touch that. So even if they weren't passing their bills, that Social Security and Medicare 6 percent or 7 percent a year buries us.
Gillespie: So what about Republicans? How do they jack up spending?
Riedl: Republicans talk a good game. But if you take a look at 2017 and 2018, Republicans had the trifecta. They had the House, the Senate, and the presidency. They didn't reform entitlements at all. There was a little bit of push to repeal Obamacare that failed. There was no Social Security reform, no Medicare reform, no Medicaid reform. Instead, they came in, cut taxes, and busted the discretionary spending caps with a 13 percent hike in one year.
When Republicans get the trifecta, when Republicans control the government, the first thing they want to do is reward their constituents. They're not thinking in terms of deficit reduction. They're thinking in terms of handing out benefits to constituents, whether it's big defense hikes, big discretionary hikes, or tax cuts. You don't get the fiscal spinach from Republicans when they control everything. They consider it time to party. Republicans need to be judged by their actions, not their rhetoric. You listen to Republicans give speeches, "We're going to balance the budget. We're going to reduce wasteful spending, and we're going to cut waste, fraud, and abuse." It's all empty rhetoric. If you look at Republicans, not only is their past record terrible, but their current proposals to reduce the deficit don't even reduce the deficit. Every Republican presidential candidate has an economic plan that increases deficits, every one of them.
The House Budget Committee released a budget blueprint that was entirely gimmicks. The Freedom Caucus, for all their talk, has released no actual blueprint to how to balance the budget. In fact, Republicans take 75 percent of spending off the table. They say, "We're not going to touch Social Security, Medicare, defense, veterans, and interest." They immediately take 75 percent off the table. So it's hard to trust a party that cuts taxes, increases spending, and then moving forward takes 75 percent of the spending off the table and won't tell us where they'd cut the other 25 percent. I think you need to judge them by their actions, not their empty balance the budget rhetoric.
Gillespie: Are there Democrats who are more serious about fiscal responsibility?
Riedl: There are some. What are the modern equivalent of blue dog democrats? The blue dogs were wiped out under Obama. There is a quiet group of Democrats, about two or three dozen of them in the House, that are trying to work with Republicans kind of under the table on budget process reform, Social Security and Medicare reform. They're very quiet about it.
In the Senate, you have [Sens.] Joe Manchin [(R–W.Va.)], Michael Bennet [(D–Colo.)], and Mark Warner [(D–Va.)]. There are some Democrats who at least talk a better game than even Republicans. But there hasn't been, of course, much action. The Democrats who are reasonable on this issue are unfortunately overshadowed by the loud progressives who cost their party any credibility when you have [Sen. Elizabeth] Warren [(D–Mass.)], [Sen. Bernie] Sanders [(I-Vt.)] and [Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D–N.Y.)] demanding $40 trillion in spending.
Gillespie: How important is the presidency when it comes to increases or decreases in spending?
Riedl: The president cannot cut spending himself or herself. The president does not have the full power of the purse. And that's why I think sometimes presidents get too much blame when spending rises. When they tried to cut spending, Congress wouldn't cut it. That being said, you can't cut spending without the president being involved. The president has to sign the bills. And the president also has the bully pulpit to frame the issue. If presidents would actually invest political capital in spending cuts, they can create the framework in order to help us get there. They can't do it themselves. But again, the problem is we haven't really had a serious fiscal conservative president in memory. Not only are they not a help, they're usually a barrier to spending cuts.
Gillespie: The budgeting process that comes out of Congress was reformed in the mid-'70s or early '70s. People in Congress don't follow it. Is that part of the problem?
Riedl: The 1974 Budget Act has been neutered into oblivion. One way to think about how it works is every year Congress is supposed to pass a budget. They never do.
Gillespie: And they're supposed to pass a budget before that budget year starts.
Riedl: Right, they're supposed to pass the budget in March for the following October 1.
Gillespie: How many times does that happen?
Riedl: Rarely. And then after that, you're supposed to pass 12 appropriations bills that actually fund the programs. The first problem is the appropriations bills only fund discretionary spending, which is 30 percent of the government. The budget process takes 70 percent of spending on autopilot out of the process. We're talking Social Security, Medicare, anti-poverty programs, Medicaid, farm subsidies. They're not even part of the budget process. They're just set aside on permanent autopilot.
Congress spends all year tearing itself apart over the remaining 30 percent that's discretionary spending. And then you have situations like now where we're almost six months into the next fiscal year, and we still don't have discretionary appropriations for this year. We're still just running last year's numbers on autopilot. So the '74 Budget Act simply doesn't work anymore. If its goal is to help Congress set priorities, make tradeoffs, and shape a holistic view of the budget, it's nonfunctional.
Gillespie: What gave rise to the '74 Budget Act? And does that have any lessons for how we might reform things today?
Riedl: The '74 Budget Act resulted primarily from Nixon trying to impound money. There was a huge constitutional crisis under Nixon, where he was trying to impound money that had been already appropriated by Congress. Impoundment means the spending has already been signed into law and the president says, as chief executive, I'm not spending the money.
Gillespie: What was he trying to not spend money on?
Riedl: That I do not know right now. But the Supreme Court essentially shot down impoundment and said, if the law says to spend it, the president doesn't have a choice. That's why the Budget Act was called the Budget and Impoundment Act. But also what was happening back then is the budget was expanding. We were just past the Great Society. You had huge new government programs and a totally unwieldy process. It was just kind of all funded on an ad hoc basis. So the combination of the Great Society and impoundment drove the '74 Budget Act.
Gillespie: Is there anything that might spark a reform of the budgeting process?
Riedl: The challenge right now is everybody in Congress knows the process is broken. The debt limit, the government shutdowns, that often motivates members to say that this is no way to run a country. We keep having debt limit crises. We keep having government shutdown crises. The problem with budget reform that we've run into is there have been a lot of commissions in Congress and a lot of working groups and a lot of special blue ribbon lawmaker commissions. Nearly every reform they come up with dies because somebody's ox gets gored. Some committee is going to lose power, whether it's that the Appropriations Committee is going to lose to the Budget Committee or that the Budget Committee is going to have to give power to Appropriations, or the Ways and Means [Committee] is going to lose some authority over some of their entitlement programs.
Budget process starts out idealistic and good government, and it ends up devolving into a turf war between members over who can control what, and the whole system falls apart. One way of doing it, potentially, is enact reforms that don't go into effect for five, seven, eight years so that members who are voting on it don't have to worry that they won't be the committee chairman anymore.
Gillespie: What's the role then of public opinion? In your theory of social change, does it come from people protesting bad budget processing and things like that?
Riedl: You know, I have a sign up in my office. I believe it's a quote that says, "Do not think that public opinion doesn't matter in the long run. It's the only thing that does matter." And ultimately, I have worked 20 years trying to adjust public opinion because when I worked on the Hill, I worked for six years in the Senate as chief economist of Sen. Rob Portman [(R–Ohio]). And when you're working in Congress and you talk to lawmakers, they will tell you the same thing. We know all these problems. We know it's unsustainable. But if I try to do anything about it, the voters will kill me.
So one of the reasons I left the Senate was I'm like, "OK, if everything comes down to public opinion because lawmakers are just weather vanes, we have to fix public opinion." The challenge addressing public opinion on deficits is nobody believes it and nobody feels it. And they've been hearing concerns of deficits for a long time. But they don't feel it as much. I mean, there's been a little bit with interest rates. My fear is that we're not going to get real budget reform until the pain starts to hit us hard enough that people feel it.
Gillespie: And that will be inflation.
Riedl: Inflation, rising interest rates, the bond market cutting us off, stock markets falling, and the danger, of course, is by the time you've gotten to that point, it's too late to fix it in any way that's not totally brutal. But I have spent 25 years trying to motivate people, even looking for a Ross Perot type or something to motivate people.
One of the reasons it's harder to get people motivated on the deficit now than, say, in the 1990s is in the 1990s, the deficit was smaller, and you could fix it by reforming programs that didn't matter as much. Today, the deficit is $2 trillion and driven almost entirely by Social Security and Medicare. It's really hard to motivate people to address the deficit when they realize that's the ox that's going to be gored. It's going to be Social Security, Medicare, and middle-class taxes. You're not going to be able to tweak your way to this like you did in the 1990s.
Gillespie: Before we go into what is to be done—and I want to talk about some of the proposals that you've articulated over the years—let's talk a little bit about Trump and Biden.
By the time George W. Bush left office, he ended up adding $10.3 trillion in deficits, beyond what was expected. Obama added $4.6 trillion in a 10-year budget window. Trump in four years had $3.9 trillion extra budget deficits that he added to the baseline. Biden, I guess, in his first 20 months, because it's still going on, added $5 trillion. So does that tell us anything essential about these people or the parties they represent?
Riedl: You don't just want to look at what the deficit was when they arrived and when they left because you might inherit a budget where everything is on autopilot getting better or everything's on autopilot getting worse. But you can further divide up these changes between legislation vs. the economy. And if you do that, Trump comes out a lot worse. Trump actually added $7.8 trillion in deficits, but he was able to save $3.9 trillion through faster economic growth, which cut the impact in half.
Gillespie: Obama came in with a terrible economy, and I think we would both agree that the actions that came after him slowed down the recovery. But by the time Trump came into office, things were picking up.
Riedl: Sure, exactly. Especially in those first three years, the economy overperformed.
Gillespie: And Biden also inherited a bad economy.
Riedl: So if you go by just legislation and you further take out the economy, Bush's legislation added $7 trillion in borrowing, Obama $5 trillion in borrowing, and Trump nearly $8 trillion in just four years. So what you see is that Bush and Trump added more than Obama, and much of Obama's debt was actually extending the Bush tax cuts. But Biden really came in all guns blazing. Like I said, he added $4.8 trillion in 20 months. He added as much debt in 20 months legislatively as Obama did in eight years. And so I think things are getting worse. That's why I'm concerned about a Trump-Biden rematch, because you have two presidents with two of the worst fiscal records of the past 100 years.
Gillespie: What is the option beyond despair when we look at the 2024 election?
Riedl: I think one hope you can have on spending in deficits is gridlock. I think if you get a full Republican government or a full Democratic government, you're going to see massive deficits. If you get gridlock, you might have some hope that even if neither side cares about the deficit, they don't want to increase the deficit the other way. Republicans don't want spending hikes. Democrats don't want tax cuts.
But other than that, the real danger coming up after this election is we have an epic fiscal cliff coming next year. Next year, the tax cuts expire and are up for renewal. That's about $4 trillion over 10 years. The recent Obamacare expansion that Biden signed expires. The discretionary spending caps expire. The infrastructure bill expires, and we hit the debt limit. So it's going to be interesting to see whether we have a unified or divided government in a situation where we have $6 trillion or $7 trillion in renewals coming, and whether or not they're going to try to constrain or blow this out of the water.
Gillespie: Talk a bit about how gridlock has operated in the 21st century. Because Bush came in and ultimately, by 2004, he had a united government. But in 2006, he lost control of the House and the spending slowed down toward the end of his term. Obama, as we discussed, basically elected a Republican Congress. There was a massive increase and then a kind of flatlining. It didn't quite work that way with Trump, although he also managed to fracture control of Congress. But is gridlock viable and is it good?
Riedl: Historically, gridlock is the only thing that has reduced spending and deficits. I can go a little earlier to the 1990s when President [Bill] Clinton came in and spent his first two years trying to nationalize health care. It was a disaster. Newt Gingrich comes in 1994, and all of the sudden, the entire debate is over how to balance the budget. And four years later, the budget was balanced. Clinton was dragged kicking and screaming by Republicans into this. Similarly, as you mentioned, Obama in the first two years did about $1.5 trillion in stimulus bills plus Obamacare. And it was after Republicans took the House in 2011, the next six years were six of the best years we've had. There was very little expensive legislation passing. It was Boehner and Obama at each other's throats on spending, and you had legitimate deficit reduction.
It kind of fell apart under Trump after Trump lost in 2020 because you had the pandemic. And also, the Trump Republican Party had changed so much that they were happy to team up with Nancy Pelosi to increase spending, even outside the pandemic. Like I said, even when Republicans had unified government, that version of the Republican Party was happy to make deals with Democrats that said, if you give us a 10 percent hike in defense, we'll give you a 10 percent hike in domestic discretionary spending. So, we went off the rails there. But historically, the GOP has worked really hard to constrain Democratic presidents. That's probably been the top formula for spending restraint: a Republican Congress constraining a Democratic president.
Gillespie: Let's talk about the '90s, because we managed to have balanced budgets for three years in a row?
Riedl: '98 through '01.
Gillespie: So, what happened there and how did that come about?
Riedl: There's a lot of mythology about the 1990s balanced budgets. There is a certain view that it was a massive amount of fiscal consolidation. The fiscal consolidation was actually pretty minor.
Gillespie: What do you mean by fiscal consolidation?
Riedl: Policies to reduce the deficit. You had President Clinton raise taxes in 1993, but it was only about half a percent of GDP out of a deficit that was about 5 percent of GDP. You had some modest spending restraint. But the real reason the budget got balanced and balanced faster than anybody predicted was, a) the end of the Cold War created a defense dividend. Defense spending absolutely plummeted from about 5 percent or 6 percent of GDP down to 3 percent of GDP.
At the same time, you had a big revenue bubble in the late '90s when the stock market was on fire. The defense savings and that temporary revenue bubble provided about 90 percent of the deficit reduction in the late '90s. If you want to give Clinton and Gingrich credit, it was basically staying out of the way. They didn't pass big, expensive bills. They didn't do big tax cuts. They didn't do big spending hikes. They stayed out of the way and let the defense savings happen and the revenue bubble happen.
Gillespie: And Gingrich never talked about that partly because he didn't want to be seen as
cutting defense spending.
Riedl: Right. He didn't mention that. But, you wonder then, why did the budget become unbalanced in 2001? Well, all the savings were due to a revenue bubble and defense cuts, and then you have the revenue bubble burst and then you have 9/11. The revenue bump went away at the same time the defense savings went away. You were suddenly right back to where you were 10 years earlier.
Gillespie: And then you have the added kind of secret future costs by expanding Medicare.
Riedl: And then the Bush spending spree. I think one thing that gets lost on a lot of individuals is when Bush ran on compassionate conservatism in 2000, that theme was a repudiation of Newt Gingrich. Because there was a concern that Republicans were being too aggressive cutting spending, even though they really didn't successfully cut that much.
Gillespie: Yeah, but they cut defense spending.
Riedl: Right, they didn't cut social programs at all. But there were government shutdowns. So Bush was trying to repudiate that. Bush was announcing in 2000, unlike meanspirited Newt Gingrich, I'm compassionate and I'm going to increase spending. And he did. We had no Child Left Behind, farm subsidies, a huge highway bill. Domestic discretionary spending was rising about 8 percent or 9 percent per year in addition to the defense programs. So Bush made it clear at the outset in 2000 that he was going to be a big spender.
And then 9/11 just kind of put it on the acceleration. Even if there were some fiscal conservatives in the Bush White House, the prioritization of 9/11 defense funding meant that they didn't really didn't have much leeway to play hardball with Democratic spenders. In fact, when you talk to people from the Bush White House, they will tell you, we didn't want to increase discretionary spending as much as we did. But we needed our Homeland Security and defense funding from Democrats, and we had to give them what they wanted.
Budgeting is about tradeoffs. It kind of always reminds me of [the saying], "If we can afford to go to the moon, we can afford to do something else." No, because if you do A, you cannot afford to do B.
Gillespie: In 2021, we were spending $59,188 per household. Currently it's at about $48,000. So it's come down from the peak, but not that far.
Riedl: [It's] still much higher than before the pandemic.
Gillespie: Yeah. And then it's projected in another 10 years or so to be up to $55,000. That kind of figure, does that crystallize for people that government spending is out of control?
Riedl: It does. When I talk to audiences, they can't believe the numbers. I say the government is spending at the peak of the pandemic $59,000 per household and right now about nearly $50,000 per household. And I frame it to audiences [like this]: Imagine what you could do if you were able to keep even a fraction of that money for yourself in the first place without sending it to Washington. And that crystallizes it for people just how big it's gotten. I remember when George H.W. Bush was president, we were spending $27,000 per household. That seemed high. And that's all adjusted for inflation.
But I think that should crystallize it for people. And it reminds me of a report and Wall Street Journal op-ed by my colleague at the Manhattan Institute, Judge Glock, who showed how much of people's taxes come back to the same household in benefits. I think he was estimating around 20 percent directly come back to the same household and much of the rest of it indirectly comes back to the same household. And it's really kind of dumb to send this money to Washington, have them cut an administrative haircut, and then send it right back to you.
Gillespie: This is current spending, the way the federal budget is split up: 34 percent currently goes to Social Security or Medicare, 19 percent goes to anti-poverty programs, 13 percent to defense, 10 percent to interest, and then there's 23 percent in another category. What are some of those?
Riedl: The other category? Basically education, infrastructure, border security, health research, housing. All that kind of stuff.
Gillespie: This is only going to get bigger, but a third of federal spending is Social Security and Medicare.
Riedl: And that's going to go way up.
Gillespie: And interest will likely go up if interest rates continue to climb and things like that. In the early '60s, defense spending was close to half of federal spending. And it's not so much anymore because we spend less proportionately on defense, but it's also because we spend so much on everything else.
Riedl: We've gone from one-half to one-eighth of the budget on defense.
Gillespie: What do we do in order to pay for this type of spending? Can we tax our way out of it?
Riedl: It is mathematically impossible to tax our way out of this. In order to stabilize that long term, you need non-interest savings that gradually rise to about 6 percent of GDP outside of interest. I did a report last year on taxing the rich that showed that, realistically, you can only get about 1 percent of GDP and higher revenues. If you set all upper income taxes at the highest possible rate at the revenue maximizing level, and you adjusted for the economic damage that would create, you get 1 percent to 2 percent of GDP.
Just to put a finer point on this, if you seized every dollar of every billionaire's wealth in America, their home, their car, their stocks, their vacation houses, their yachts, their businesses, you could fund the government one time for nine months. That's it. If you assessed 100 percent tax rates over $500,000 a year, you still wouldn't balance the budget. So taxing the rich should be on the table because everything needs to be on the table, but when I hear lawmakers say all we have to do is tax the rich and it'll pay for everything, that is spectacularly, mathematically false.
Gillespie: In your book you show actually that according to data from the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD)—and the OECD are advanced economies. The United States actually has the most progressive tax code. We are taxing the rich. The rich pay a higher percentage of government revenue in the U.S. than in any other country.
Riedl: Substantially more. And it's because we tax the rich at a similar level as other countries. In fact, our highest rates are actually higher for other countries. But we tax the nonwealthy so much less than other countries that it makes us more progressive.
Gillespie: The upper 10 percent of income earners in the U.S. pay about 90 percent of the taxes.
Riedl: The highest 20 percent of earners pay 90 percent of all income taxes. The bottom half collectively pays zero.
Gillespie: So does that mean in order to balance the budget, we have to tax the middle class or we have to tax a wider range of income earners?
Riedl: Here's the part that makes me really unpopular with all our audiences. If you try to build a stable budget for the next 30 years—and I don't mean stable, I don't mean balance the budget, I mean just one small enough deficit that the debt share of GDP stays at about 100 percent—you can't really get there on spending cuts alone. You have to cut that 5.5 percent of GDP. You can't really find 5.5 percent of GDP in reasonable cuts. You're going to have to have some revenue. And if taxing the rich is limited, there's going to be higher middle-class taxes. This is just a mathematical reality.
As I explained in my Dispatch article, you can't stabilize the debt with revenues at 17 percent of GDP. Spending is going to 30 [percent]. You're not going to get spending all the way down that low. And you can't get there from taxing the rich. So, middle-class taxes are going to rise.
Gillespie: Yeah, so what's the median household income now? $76,000? Something like that? What will they be paying in taxes 10 years down the road vs. now?
Riedl: It remains to be seen. I can't give a number. I think people are surprised to hear, though, that the median earning family in America today pays an effective income tax rate of 2 percent. And people say I pay more than that.
If you actually adjust for what they actually pay with the child credit, and sometimes the [Earned Income Tax Credit], the middle earning family pays an effective income tax rate of 2 percent. And then they pay an effective payroll tax of about 10 percent when you count the employer portion. So they do pay payroll, but it's going to go up from that. And the question eventually is, are we going to do most of this through payroll taxes and a value added tax, which is like a national sales tax, or through income taxes?
Gillespie: And in Europe, that is everything, right?
Riedl: We are the only country in the OECD that does not have a value added tax. I would like to keep it that way.
Gillespie: Why? What's bad about a value added tax?
Riedl: Value added taxes are actually more efficient than income taxes, if you're starting a government from scratch, because you're taxing consumption. The danger, though, is value added taxes are a cash cow. Once you start with a 1 percent rate, it's so easy to raise it to higher rates and collect a huge amount of revenue. And my concern is, I wouldn't mind replacing the income tax with a value added tax, but I don't want to get to the point where families are paying large income taxes and large value added taxes because then you're burying families. A lot of conservatives have said if we're going to switch to a consumption tax, the income tax needs to be destroyed, burned, and salted the Earth first.
Gillespie: The income tax is not that old, right? In a way, we could conceivably do that.
Riedl: It's 100 years old, the income tax. But yeah, if you're starting a government from scratch, your bets are better.
Gillespie: Can we grow our way out of this?
Riedl: No. And this might be news to Vivek Ramaswamy, who said that he was going to balance the budget by growing the economy 6 percent per year, which was absolutely absurd.
The first challenge is, we can't get that much additional economic growth, because when you look at the economic growth rates of the '50s, '60s, and '70s, most of that was rising population. The population is set to pretty much level off for the next 30 years. We're going to have almost zero growth of the work force population, which means all the growth is going to have to come from productivity. You're not going to get 4 percent, 5 percent, or 6 percent growth entirely from productivity. Mathematically, that doesn't work. You would need to do it like we did in the past with people. But the other side is, while economic growth does reduce the deficit, it also increases Social Security, Medicare and Interest costs.
Your Social Security payment is tied to your lifetime wages. The faster the economy grows, the more your wages grow, the bigger benefits you get. On Medicare, higher income is associated with higher health care consumption. Also, faster economic growth typically brings higher interest rates. And when you're in debt that much, every point interest rates rise has an enormous effect on deficits. So don't get me wrong, faster economic growth is very good and it can modestly reduce the deficit. But as long as entitlement spending and interest costs rise alongside, you're not going to get a huge deficit reduction.
Gillespie: So why don't we just cut Social Security and Medicare? Social Security was a New Deal program. It was a Depression-era program. Medicare was called the last act of the New Deal by President Lyndon Johnson. Those are programs that were designed for an economy in which you were more likely to be poor if you were an old person, if you were past retirement age. You also didn't live as long. Wouldn't it make sense to say, OK, what needs to be on the table, first and foremost, is this massive growing blob of space?
Riedl: Mathematically, it's going to have to come from Social Security and Medicare. Thirty years from now, Social Security and Medicare are going to be running a deficit of 12 percent of GDP. Just these two programs are going to be running a deficit of 12 percent of GDP if you count the interest costs that they create in the budget.
You can't raise other taxes and cut other spending enough to close 12 percent of GDP gap. The challenge, of course, is even if everything is on the table, most savings are going to have to go with the actual policy driving it. The problem is the politics. You have Republicans even tripping over themselves to say they won't touch Social Security and Medicare because the voters will kill them, because there is this perception that you're just getting back what you paid into the system, which is absurdly, patently false.
Gillespie: How is that false? Are you getting more back?
Riedl: Social Security benefits are designed to become substantially more generous each generation, even adjusted for inflation. On Medicare, it's even a bigger gap. The typical retiring couple today gets back triple what they paid into Medicare. And that's after you've adjusted in the net present value. So you can't say, "Oh, [it's because of] inflation and interest." No, even adjusted for all that, you get triple. But there is this perception that there's a savings account for me in Washington that is just going to send me back by money.
The reality is seniors get back more than they paid in. The programs are becoming more generous every generation. And baby boomers today are the richest generation, the richest age group, in the richest country in the world in the richest time in history. As a matter of fact, retiree income over the last couple decades has grown four times faster than the income of workers paying the benefits. So, Social Security and Medicare right now largely redistribute money up the income ladder, not down. Yes, some seniors struggle and you can design reforms. And I've designed reforms that protect struggling seniors. But it's really absurd that seniors making $1 million a year after retirement are still getting generous benefits.
Gillespie: This was also an issue with COVID relief. You had families making up to $400,000 cashing checks from various benefits for COVID. We've completely lost the distinction between even just median income families, much less struggling families, and people who can afford it.
Riedl: Right. And keep in mind, when we're talking about senior income, seniors making half a million a year or $400,000 a year after they retired, this isn't even wage income. This is interest and Social Security income. These are net worths far into the millions.
Gillespie: But, the youngest boomers are 59, I guess, right? So, they're moving into retirement and they will die. And I think about that on an almost daily basis as a boomer myself. But they're going to give a lot of that money back to people, right? They have so much, they're going to leave it to their kids. Does that affect these calculations?
Riedl: It can, over time. I mean, if you assume a certain degree of inheritance, especially simply housing values. Boomers have so much home equity, and frankly, they're hanging on to the home equity a little too much to make the housing market difficult for their kids. But eventually, when they go, those are going to be inherited by their kids. And those huge 401(k)s are going to be inherited by their kids. That should make it a little easier. I'm Gen X. That should make it easier for Gen X and millennials to get by with less. And I've been telling people for years, if you're a Gen X or a millennial and you're assuming that Social Security is going to be there forever in its current form with no savings, you're just not paying attention. You should save as if Social Security and Medicare are a bonus because the programs will exist, don't get me wrong, but I wouldn't take the little mailing you get from Social Security with your future benefits too literally.
Gillespie: How do we activate Gen X, but especially millennials and Gen Z, to get motivated about this? How do we reach them to start creating that movement for social change on this policy?
Riedl: That is the million dollar question. It's kind of remarkable that we are facing the largest intergenerational transfer of wealth in world history. And while young people are often voting on the trendy issues of the day or not voting at all, seniors are going to the polls in record numbers and robbing them blind. And young people are completely oblivious to the fact that seniors are robbing you blind while you're voting on side issues. You have to get their attention. And one thing that I try to point out to younger progressives, and I haven't had a lot of luck, is whatever priorities you have in the future—not having your taxes go up, family leave, child care, health care, climate safety net—you're going to get squeezed.
There is no way we can pay for any of the priorities you have. If we're giving $116 trillion in extra benefits to senior citizens, the math doesn't work. One thing that a lot of conservatives think about with motivating young people is climate change. Young people are so focused on climate change, even though it's something that's 30 to 40 years off—you don't feel it now, and some years it gets a little better and some years it gets worse—but young people are totally attuned to these long term climate projections and their effect.
And conservatives are often asking, well, how do we get them to focus on long-term debt projections, which is a danger to them—I don't want to say just as much as climate. I don't want to get into that debate, but it's real. And the costs that are in the system are not theoretical projections. The seniors walk among us and they have the letters saying how much they get. If there's a way we could motivate them the same way they're motivated on climate, that would be a success. But we haven't had much luck.
Gillespie: What about younger conservatives? And to be honest, I don't care about progressives or conservatives. I care more about libertarians, and they seem to be somewhat in sync with these ideas. If you're right of center, and you're not as suspicious of capitalism, or you're not as motivated by climate change, what works to grab people?
Riedl: If I knew, I would have grabbed them by now. I think there is a certain perception, at least among right-of-center young people, that Social Security and Medicare are unsustainable. I don't think you have to really convince them of that. I think you have to get them to care about it though. And when I talk to young people on the right, to be honest, they're a little too focused on Twitter, the culture war, and Trump owning the libs that you can't really get much policy focus. They get it, but they're just not motivated on it yet. And again, if I knew a way to reach them better, I'd love to do it.
Gillespie: How do you reach your own generation of Gen X? It was very popular in the '90s, as I recall, that members of Gen X were more likely to believe in UFOs than that they were going to get collective security or Medicare. Are they still keeping the faith or are they lost in the hurly burly of everyday life?
Riedl: I think Gen X now has it in their DNA to be skeptical that Social Security and Medicare are going to be there for them. When I talk to people in my generation, they're not necessarily motivated to do anything about it, because I think when you talk to Gen Xers, there's bigger things going on in the world that are getting their attention politically. There is Trump, Biden, all the culture war stuff. That's what they're voting on. But they're aware that we're facing problems.
Gillespie: The leading edge of Gen X is really going to be in the pinch point when all of this blows up.
Riedl: We're going to be the ones hit with the drastic changes when you have to do it. But you mentioned the '90s with Social Security. That was the time to fix it. You know, the reason to fix Social Security in the '90s was not because the program was going to go bankrupt in the '90s. It was always going to go bankrupt around 2030.
But that was the time to phase in the reforms while people were young. And we missed the window in the '90s and early 2000s to gradually phase in reforms for boomers. And because we didn't, now we're going to have to do the more drastic reforms. And as you mentioned, when there's a ratchet of benefits, we're going to be the ones being ratcheted because we didn't do the reform 20, 30 years ago when we were warned to do it.
Gillespie: Do you think we'll be in a better place fiscally, or in terms of budget, a year from now, five years from now, 10 years from now?
Riedl: We're going to be in a worse place just because I think deficits are looking to get much bigger—$2 to $3 trillion deficits. I don't see Congress going in the other direction. Things are going to get worse until either voters wake up or the financial markets cut us off. I'm really hoping it's the first option, that voters wake up, but I'm just not seeing it.
This interview has been condensed and edited for style and clarity.
The post Brian Riedl: Who Bankrupted Us More—Trump or Biden? appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>In this week's The Reason Roundtable, Matt Welch is back, alongside Katherine Mangu-Ward, Nick Gillespie, and Peter Suderman. The editors talk about Nikki Haley's primary defeat in her home state of South Carolina and President Joe Biden's plan to attack "corporate greed."
00:36—Nikki Haley loses in South Carolina.
15:42—Biden's plan to attack "corporate greed"
29:06—Weekly Listener Question
46:41—This week's cultural recommendations
Send your questions to roundtable@reason.com. Be sure to include your social media handle and the correct pronunciation of your name.
Mentioned in this podcast:
"Donald Trump Defeats Nikki Haley in South Carolina Primary," by Joe Lancaster
"Losing the Home State," by Liz Wolfe
Reason Foundation Pension Reform
"In 2020, Teachers Unions and Police Unions Showed Their True Colors," by Peter Suderman
"Want To Challenge Your Speed Camera Ticket? That'll Be $100." by Daryl James and Bobbi Taylor
"After the War," by Matt Welch
"Sovereignty Is Such a Lonely Word," by Matt Welch
"We Are Going to the Moon," by Eric Berger
"Kevin Costner Goes Back to the Well of Westerns in Yellowstone," by Glenn Garvin
"Saturday Night Live Fires New Cast Member Shane Gillis for Using Offensive Language," by Robby Soave
"Biden's Job Approval Edges Down to 38%," by Megan Brenan
"2024 General Election: Trump vs. Biden vs. Kennedy vs. West" in RealClearPolling
"Comparison of opinion polling during the Trump and Biden administrations" in Ballotpedia
Party of the People by Patrick Ruffini
"Narrow Wins In These Key States Powered Biden To The Presidency" by Benjamin Swasey and Connie Hanzhang Jin
"How Americans View the Conflicts Between Russia and Ukraine, Israel and Hamas, and China and Taiwan" by Jordan Lippert
Today's sponsor:
Audio production by Ian Keyser; assistant production by Hunt Beaty.
Music: "Angeline," by The Brothers Steve
The post Nikki Haley's Primary Math Isn't Mathing appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>Just 15 percent of Americans approve of the job Congress is doing. But why is it broken and how do we fix it? Those are just two of the questions that Reason's Nick Gillespie asked Justin Amash, the former five-term congressman from Michigan who is currently exploring a Senate run.
Elected as part of the Tea Party wave in 2010, Amash helped create the House Freedom Caucus but became an increasingly lonely, principled voice for limiting the size, scope, and spending of the federal government. After voting to impeach Donald Trump, he resigned from the GOP, became an independent, and then joined the Libertarian Party in 2020, making him the only Libertarian to serve in Congress.
They talked about the 2024 presidential election and the country's political and cultural polarization that seems to be growing with every passing day. And about how his parents' experiences as a Christian refugee from Palestine and an immigrant from Syria inform his views on foreign policy, entrepreneurship, and American exceptionalism.
This Q&A took place on the final day of LibertyCon, the annual event for Students for Liberty that took place recently in Washington, D.C.
Today's sponsor:
Watch the full video here and find a condensed transcript below.
Nick Gillespie: Why is Congress broken and how do we fix that?
Justin Amash: We can take up the whole 30 minutes talking about that if we wanted to. We don't know exactly how Congress got to where it is, but today it is highly centralized, where a few people at the top control everything. And that has a lot of negative consequences for our country. Among them is that the president has an unbelievable amount of power because the president now only has to negotiate with really a few people. You have to negotiate with the speaker of the House. You have to negotiate with the Senate majority leader and maybe some of the minority leaders. But it's really a small subset of people that you have to negotiate with. And when that happens, it gives the president so much leverage.
So when we talk about things like going to war without authorization, as long as the speaker of the House isn't going to hold the president accountable and the Senate majority leader is not going to, the president is just going to do what he wants to do. And when it comes to spending, as long as the president only has to negotiate with a couple of people, the president's going to do whatever the president wants to do. So it's super easy in the system for the president to essentially bully Congress and dictate the outcomes.
But there's a deeper problem with all of this, which is that representative government is supposed to be a discovery process. You elect people to represent you. You send them to Washington, and then the outcomes are supposed to be discovered by these representatives through discussions and debates, and the introduction of legislation, and amendments. You're supposed to have lots of votes, where the votes freely reflect your will representing the people back home. But instead, in Congress today, a few leaders are deciding what the final product is and then they're not bringing it to the floor until they know they have the votes. So there's no actual discovery process. Nancy Pelosi used to brag about this; she wouldn't bring a bill to the floor unless she knew it was going to pass. Which is the opposite of how Congress should work.
Gillespie: What are some of the ways to decentralize power within Congress? When you were in Congress, you founded the Freedom Caucus, which was supposed to be kind of a redoubt of people who believed in limited government and libertarian and conservative principles and actually even some liberal principles, but decentralizing authority. You got kicked out of the Freedom Caucus, right?
Amash: Well, I resigned from it.
Gillespie: Well, you were asked to leave. The police sirens were coming, and it's like, "Hey, you know what? I'm going to go," right? But even places like that, that were explicitly designed to act as a countervailing force to this unified Congress, how can that happen? What can you do or what can somebody do to make that happen?
Amash: Well, it does take people with strong will. I think that when we go to vote for our elected officials, when you go to vote for a representative, when you go to vote for a senator, you have to know that that person is willing to stand up to the leadership team. And if that person's not willing to break from the leadership team on a consistent basis—and this doesn't mean they have to be mean or anything like that; it just means that they have to be independent enough where you know they're willing to break from their leadership team. If they're not willing to do that, it doesn't matter how much they agree with you on the issues, don't vote for them because that person is going to sell out. There's no chance they're going to stand up for you when it counts. I think you need to have people who have a strong will, who are going to go there and actually represent you and are willing to stand up to the leaders.
Gillespie: If you are interested in Congressman Amash's commentary on contemporary issues, go to his substack Justin Amash. The tagline is: "A former congressman spills on Congress and makes the practical case for the principles of liberty." It's a great read, particularly on issues you mentioned.
Can you tell us how you discovered libertarian ideas? You got elected in 2010, which was a wave election. It was part of the Tea Party reaction to eight years of Bush, and more problems during the financial crisis and the reaction of the government to that. Where did you first encounter the ideas of liberty, and how did that motivate you to get into Congress?
Amash: The ideas of liberty are something that have been with me since I was a child. It's hard to pinpoint exactly where they came from. I think they came from my parents' immigrant experience, coming to the United States. My dad came here as a refugee from Palestine. He was born in Palestine in 1940. And when the state of Israel was created in '48, he became a refugee. My mom is a Syrian immigrant.
When my parents came here, they weren't wealthy. My dad was a very poor refugee. He was so poor that the Palestinians made fun of him. So that's really poor. When he came here, he didn't have much, but he felt he had an opportunity. He felt he had a chance to start a new life, a chance to make it, even though he came from a different background from a lot of people, even though his English wasn't great compared to a lot of people. So he came here and he worked hard, and he built a business. When we were young, he used to tell us that America is the greatest place on earth, where someone can come here as a refugee like he did and start a new life and have the chance to be successful. It doesn't matter what your background is. It doesn't matter what obstacles you face. You have a chance here and you don't have that chance in so many places around the world.
I think that's where that spirit of liberty came from. It was from my dad's experience especially, my mom as well, coming here as a young immigrant. So I was always a little bit anti-authoritarian as a child. I rebelled against teachers at times. I didn't like arbitrary authority, let's put it that way. When someone would just make up a rule, like this is the rule, "I just say so." Well, tell me why.
Gillespie: Have you rethought that as a parent?
Amash: No, I mean, I let my kids think very freely.
Gillespie: As long as they follow the rules.
Amash: I don't mind when they are a little bit rebellious. I think it doesn't hurt for kids to have some independence. I encourage them to challenge their teachers, even when they think the teacher is wrong about something. I think that it's a good thing for people to go out there and not just accept everything as it is.
Gillespie: You famously, as a congressman, explained all of your votes on Facebook, which is a rare concession by authority to say, okay, this is why I did what I did.
Amash: Yeah. Actually, a lot of the people in leadership and in Congress didn't like that I was doing that because I was giving people at home the power to challenge them. Instead of just being told this is the way it is, now I was revealing what was going on.
Gillespie: You grew up in Michigan. You went to the University of Michigan as an undergrad and for law school. Was it there that you started coming across names like Hayek, and Mises, and Friedman, Rand, and Rothbard?
Amash: Not really, no. My background is in economics, my degree is in economics. I did well in economics at Michigan, but we sure didn't study Austrian economics. We didn't study Hayek. I think he might have been mentioned in one class. Very briefly he was mentioned, like there was one day where he was mentioned. But I'd say that what happened is, as I went through my economics degree, and then I got a law degree at Michigan as well, I started to realize that I had a lot of differences from other people who were otherwise aligned with me. I was a Republican. I aligned with them on a lot of things, but there were a number of issues where we didn't align— some of the foreign policy issues, but certainly a lot of civil liberties issues.
I started to wonder, what am I? What's going on here? I just thought of myself as a Republican, and I would read the platform and hear what they're saying. They believe in limited government, economic freedom, and individual liberty.
But when push came to shove on a lot of issues, they didn't believe those things. They'd say they believe those things, but they didn't. I've told this story before, I just typed some of my views into a Google search, and up popped Hayek's Wikipedia page. Literally, it was like the top thing on Google. So I clicked on that, started reading about them, and I was already in my mid-20s at this time. And I was like, yes, this is what I believe.
Gillespie: It is interesting because you would have been coming of age during a time when the Republicans were ascendant. But they were the war party. And we were told after 9/11 that you should not speak freely. That was kind of a problem, right?
Amash: Yeah, sure. Throughout my life, I believed in freedom of speech, freedom of thought, and freedom of expression. These are critical values. Maybe they're the essence of everything that makes this country work. The idea that we come from a lot of places—there's an incredible amount of diversity in the United States. I think diversity is always treated or often treated like a bad word these days. But it's a blessing to our country that we have people who come from so many backgrounds. Actually, the principle of liberty is about utilizing that diversity.
It's in centrally planned systems where diversity is not utilized, where someone at the top dictates to everyone else and doesn't take advantage of any of the diversity. They say no, a few of us at the top, we know everything. It doesn't matter. All of your backgrounds, all of your skills, all of your talents, that doesn't matter. What matters is we've got a few people in a room somewhere, and they're going to decide everything. And they know best because they're experts.
Gillespie: You came into office in 2011, and it seemed like there was a real libertarian insurgency within the Republican Party. But more nationally in discourse, people were tired of continued centralization, and government secrecy—famously, a lot of Bush's activities and particularly war spending early on was done in supplemental and emergency preparations, not really open to full discussions.
All of the stuff coming out of the Patriot Act, somebody like Dick Cheney kind of saying we're in control. But then Obama also promised the most transparent administration ever and plainly did not deliver on that.
That energy pushing back on centralization and government power and government secrecy that helped bring you and other people like you to Congress seems to have dissipated. Do you agree with that? And if so, what took that away?
Amash: Yeah, I agree with that. When I was running for office, both for State House in 2009 and when I got to Congress in 2011, there was a lot of energy behind a limited government, libertarian-ish republicanism. I felt like libertarianism was really rising. There was a chance for libertarian ideals to get a lot of traction. A lot of people who used to be more like Bush conservatives were coming around to the libertarian way.
I felt really good about where things were heading. And for the first, I'd say three or four years that I was in Congress, I felt like we continued to move in the right direction. The creation of the Freedom Caucus was kind of a dream of bringing people together to challenge the leadership. They weren't all libertarians or anything like that. There are a few who are libertarian-leaning, but the idea that a group of Republican members—it wasn't determined that it was going to be only Republicans, but it ended up being Republicans—got together and said, "Hey, we're going to challenge the status quo. We're going to challenge the establishment." That was kind of a dream that had come together.
Then when Donald Trump came on the scene, I think a lot of that just fell apart because he's such a strong personality and character, and had so much hold over a lot of the public, especially on the Republican side, that it was very hard for my colleagues to be able to challenge him.
Gillespie: What's the essential appeal of Trump? Is it his personality? Is that that he said he could win and he ended up doing that at least once? Is it a cult of personality? What's the core of his appeal to you?
Amash: I think he is definitely a unique character. He has a certain charisma that is probably unmatched in politics. I don't think I've ever seen someone who campaigns as effectively as he does. It doesn't mean you have to agree with all of the ethics of what he does or any of that, or the substance.
Gillespie: To keep it in Michigan, he's a rock star. He's Iggy Pop. You may not like what he's doing on the stage, but you can't take your eyes off it.
Amash: That's right. He holds court. When he's out there, people pay attention. He really understands the essence of campaigning, and how to win a campaign. He understands how to effectively go after opponents. Now, again, I'm not saying that all of these things are necessarily ethical or that other people should do the same things, but he really understands how to lead a populist movement.
Gillespie: How important do you think in his appeal is a politics of resentment, that somehow he is going to get back what was taken from you?
Amash: The whole Make America Great Again, there's a whole idea there of "someone is destroying your life, and I'm going to get it back for you." That's a very powerful thing to a lot of people. For a lot of people out there, it is more important to get back at others than necessarily to have some kind of vision of how this is all going to work going forward. It's not appealing to me because I understand, we live in one country. We have people of all sorts of backgrounds. And if you're going to persuade people, you have to be able to live with them and work with them, regardless of your differences. It doesn't mean that you can't be upset, be angry about what some other people are doing or saying. But there has to be an effort to live together here as one country. We have too much in common in this country.
Gillespie: Michigan was a massive swing state when he won the election. You voted to impeach Donald Trump. What went into that calculation? What was the reaction like to that? That's a profile in courage.
Amash: Well, I don't think that's my most courageous vote, not even by a long shot.
Gillespie: What was? Naming the post office after your father?
Amash: I didn't name any post offices after my father, to be clear. I think that the courageous votes are the ones where everyone is against you. And I don't mean just one party. It's one thing to vote for impeachment and half the country loves what you did and half the country doesn't like what you did. That's, in my mind, not that challenging or difficult. It's when you take a vote and you know that 99 percent of the public is going to misconstrue this, misunderstand it, be against it. The vote is going to be something like 433 to 1 in the House or something like that. Those are the tough votes. And there are plenty of those votes out there, where you're taking a principled stand and you're doing it to protect people's rights. But it's not the typical narrative.
Gillespie: Is there an example that, in your legislative record, you would put forth for that?
Amash: One of the ones I've talked about before is, they tried to pass some anti-lynching legislation at the federal level and everyone's against lynching, obviously, but the legislation itself was bad and would actually harm a lot of people, including harming a lot of black Americans. There was this idea that this legislation was good and parroted by a lot of people in the media. They didn't read the legislation. In fact, I complained about it and it mysteriously did not pass both houses of Congress after I pointed out all the problems with it. It did pass the House of Representatives. Did not pass both Houses and get signed by the president. Mysteriously, the next Congress, they reintroduced it and rewrote it in a way that took into consideration all of my complaints, and they tried to pass it off like they were just reintroducing the same legislation. I pointed out: They actually saw that there was a problem here and then tried to pretend like, "Oh, we're just passing it again." Those kinds of votes are tough because when you take the vote, everyone thinks you're wrong. Everyone. And you have to go home and you have to explain it. Those are the ones that are tricky.
Back to the impeachment point. Look, I'd impeach every president. Let's be clear. I'm not the kind of person who's going to introduce impeachment legislation over every little thing that a president does wrong. When you introduce legislation to impeach a president, you have to have some backing for it. It can't just be one person saying, let's impeach.
For example, I would definitely impeach President Biden over these unconstitutional wars 100 percent. But the idea of introducing impeachment legislation suggests there's other people who will join you. Otherwise, it's just an exercise in futility. You introduce it. It doesn't go anywhere. It just sits there. If we're going to impeach people, there has to be some public backing, which is why I try to make the case all the time for these impeachable offenses, why some legislation should be brought forth. But you've got to get the public behind you on that kind of stuff. I think that every president should be impeached, every recent president at least.
Gillespie: If Trump's populism, national conservatism, and politics of resentment are sucking up a lot of energy on the right, how do we deal with the rise of identity politics and a kind of woke progressivism on the left? Where is that coming from? And what is the best way to combat that?
Amash: I think a lot of it is just repackaged socialist ideas, collectivist ideas. The idea of equity, for example, is really like a perversion of the idea of equality. In most respects, when people say equity, they mean the opposite of equality. It means you're going to have the government or some central authority decide what the outcomes should be, how much each person should have, rather than some system of equality before the law, where the government is not some kind of arbiter of who deserves what. When you think about it, there is no way for the government to do this. There's no way for the government to properly assess all of our lives. This is in many ways the point of diversity: we're all so different. There's no way that a central authority can decide how to manage all that.
For many of the people on the woke left who say they care about diversity, they don't care about diversity if they're talking about equity. These things are in conflict with each other. The idea that you're going to decide that someone is more deserving than another based on some superficial characteristics. As an example—I've talked about this and I've talked about this earlier in this conversation—my dad came here with nothing as a poor refugee. Yet, in a lot of cases, he might be classified as just a white American. Even though he came here as an extremely poor Palestinian refugee. The New York Times, for example, classifies me as white. They might classify someone else who's Middle Eastern as a person of color.
I think a lot of this is just, someone is making decisions at the top saying, "Well, we think this person is more like this or that, and we're going to decide they're more deserving." But they don't know our backgrounds. They don't know anything about us. They don't know who deserves this or who deserves that. No central authority could figure that out. The best thing we can do is have a system of equality before the law, where the law treats everyone the same. It doesn't give an advantage to any person over another person. It may not be fair in some sense to some people. Some people might say, "well, that's not fair."
Some people, instead of having a dad who's a Palestinian refugee, their dad was some Silicon Valley billionaire. Some person might have a dad who was a professor. Another person might have a dad who worked at a fast-food restaurant. You don't know what the differences are. The government can't figure all of this out and say who is more deserving than someone else. So I really think that the woke left, when they pushed this idea of equity, they're really pushing against diversity. They're saying, a few people at the top are gonna decide who's valuable and who's not valuable, and they're not going to actually take into consideration any of our differences, because no central authority could take it into consideration.
Gillespie: You are a libertarian, not an anarchist. You believe there is a role for government, but it should be obviously much more limited. You are also an Orthodox Christian. Could you talk a little bit about how in a world of limited government, a libertarian world, the government wouldn't be doing everything for everybody, but placing organizations and institutions like the church or other types of intervening, countervailing, mediating institutions would help to fill the gaps that are left by the government?
Amash: The place for these organizations is to help society, not to have government deciding it. When you have some central authority deciding it, you are really limiting the opportunities for the public. You're limiting the opportunities for assisting people. You're deciding that a few people are going to make all the decisions, rather than having a lot of organizations and a lot of individuals making decisions.
When you centralize it all, there are a lot of people who are going to be missed, a lot of people who are going to be ignored. When you let the marketplace work this out, when you let private organizations work this out, there is a lot more opportunity for people who need help to get help. I think that's really important.
Gillespie: There was a libertarian wave—I like to call it a libertarian moment—which I think we're still living in, but we don't understand, rhetoric aside. What are the best ways to get libertarian ideas and sensibilities in front of young people, to really energize Gen Z? The world is getting young again. How do we make sure that these people are hearing and understanding and maybe being persuaded by libertarian ideas?
Amash: For one thing, we have to meet them where they are. I spend a lot of time, for example, asking my kids, which social media kids use these days? They're in a lot of places that the adults aren't. We might be on Facebook—I mean, my generation, your generation. Other people are on X or Twitter. And there are other people on TikTok.
You have to meet them where they are and if they're not on X and—it's still weird to call it X—if they're not on X and you are, well, they're not hearing your message. That's an issue. That's something we all have to work on. I'm probably reaching primarily Gen X and millennial people on X, and I'm probably not reaching Gen Z people as well. I think we need to work on getting them in those places.
Also, I think people who have libertarian instincts, people who want to present libertarianism and have an opportunity, go speak to students at schools. I used to do this as a member of Congress. I used that opportunity as much as I could. When schools would invite me, I'd say, "Yes, I'd be happy to come to the school to speak to the students" and take all their questions and be open about being a libertarian. Tell them frankly that your philosophy is libertarianism and talk to them about it. I think it's great. A lot of teachers end up surprised. I've had many teachers walk up to me and whisper to me, "I think I'm a libertarian, too," after having the conversation because they have stereotypes about what it might mean to be a libertarian and you have the opportunity to change their mind.
Gillespie: I have seen a lot of chatter. I have actually helped publish a lot of chatter that you may be running for the U.S. Senate from the mediocre state of Michigan. Do you have an announcement that you would like to make?
Amash: As a part of the national championship-winning state of Michigan this year, I am exploring a run for Senate. The [Federal Election Commission] FEC requires me to state that I am not a candidate for Senate, but I am exploring a run for Senate.
If you're interested in checking it out, go to https://exploratory.justinamash.com/. I'm giving it serious thought. I think that there is an opportunity for libertarians this year, and there's an opportunity to win a Republican Senate seat this year. So I'm looking at the Republican primary. I think this is probably the best shot libertarians have had in a long time in the state of Michigan.
This interview has been condensed and edited for style and clarity.
Photo Credits: Bill Clark/CQ Roll Call/Newscom; BONNIE CASH/UPI/Newscom
The post Justin Amash: 'I'd Impeach Every President' appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>In this week's The Reason Roundtable, Katherine Mangu-Ward is in the driver's seat, alongside Nick Gillespie and special guests Zach Weissmueller and Eric Boehm. The editors react to the latest plot twists in Donald Trump's various legal proceedings and the death of Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny.
00:41—The trials of Donald Trump in Georgia and New York
25:04—Weekly Listener Question
33:23—Sora, a new AI video tool
43:55—The death of Alexei Navalny
49:58—This week's cultural recommendations
Mentioned in this podcast:
"How a New York Judge Arrived at a Staggering 'Disgorgement' Order Against Trump," by Jacob Sullum
"Prosecutor Fani Willis Touts the Value of Cash, but What About the Rest of Us?" by J.D. Tuccille
"Trump Ordered To Pay $364 Million for Inflating His Assets in Civil Fraud Trial," by Joe Lancaster
"Alvin Bragg Is Trying To Punish Trump for Something That Is Not a Crime," by Jacob Sullum
"Alexei Navalny's Death Is a Timely Reminder of How Much Russia Sucks," by Eric Boehm
"Why Is Nike Stomping on Independent Creators?" by Kevin P. Alexander
"Bury My Sneakers at Wounded Knee," by Nick Gillespie
"Creation Myth: Does innovation require intellectual property rights?" by Douglas Clement
"A Private Libertarian City in Honduras," by Zach Weissmueller
"The Real Reasons Africa Is Poor—and Why It Matters," by Nick Gillespie
"Justice or persecution? The Trump dilemma"
Send your questions to roundtable@reason.com. Be sure to include your social media handle and the correct pronunciation of your name.
Today's sponsor:
Audio production by Ian Keyser; assistant production by Hunt Beaty.
Music: "Angeline," by The Brothers Steve
The post Goodbye, Navalny appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>In January, the Senate Judiciary Committee dragged the heads of Meta, TikTok, and X, formally known as Twitter, to Washington to charge them with exploiting children by allegedly addicting them to social media that sexually harms them, drives them to eating disorders, and even kills them. The Spanish Inquisition vibe of the proceedings reached a crescendo when Sen. Josh Hawley (R–Mo.) demanded that Mark Zuckerberg apologize to the families of children for the "harms" supposedly caused by Facebook and pay compensation out of his personal fortune.
But is social media really that bad for kids? And is the solution being pushed by Democrats and Republicans alike—universal age verification for all users of the internet—even technically feasible without shredding the First Amendment, destroying privacy, and creating major security issues? The answer is a resounding no, according to Shoshana Weissmann, director of digital media at R Street, a free market think tank, and author of "The Fundamental Problems with Social Media Age-Verification Legislation." Reason's Nick Gillespie interviewed Weissmann in Washington, D.C., in early February.
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The post Shoshana Weissmann: Online Age Verification Rules Are Unconstitutional and Ineffective appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>In this week's The Reason Roundtable, editors Matt Welch, Nick Gillespie, Peter Suderman, and special guest Emma Camp react to the announcement that President Joe Biden will not be prosecuted for mishandling classified documents and parse a fresh batch of speech gaffes underpinning his apparent cognitive decline.
00:29—Quick reactions to last night's Super Bowl LVIII
06:10—Special counsel will not prosecute Joe Biden in classified documents case.
26:06—House Republicans attempt to tie foreign aid spending bill to domestic border crisis.
35:12—Weekly Listener Question
44:48—Congressional Budget Office delivers latest bleak report on future U.S. economic outlook
52:26—This week's cultural recommendations
Mentioned in this podcast:
"Joe Biden's No Good, Very Bad Day," by J.D. Tuccille
"Nice Old Man," by Liz Wolfe
"Trump's Alleged Defiance and Deceit Distinguish His Handling of Secrets From Biden's," by Jacob Sullum
"Americans Unhappy With Politicians They'll Soon Vote Back Into Office," by J.D. Tuccille
"Biden's Bizarre 'Shrinkflation' Nonsense," by Eric Boehm
"Elizabeth Warren's 'Shrinkflation' Rant Is an Incredible Exercise in Blame Shifting," by Christian Britschgi
"The Real Student Loan Crisis Isn't From Undergraduate Degrees," by Emma Camp
"The Bankruptcy of Bidenomics," by Peter Suderman
"Border Bill Blows Up," by Robby Soave
"The Good and the Bad of the Senate Border Bill," by Fiona Harrigan
"'Zero Illegal Crossings' Is an Unattainable Goal for the Border," by Fiona Harrigan
"Peter Meijer: Can the GOP Change?" by Zach Weissmueller and Liz Wolfe
"Can Free Markets Win Votes in the New GOP?" by Stephanie Slade
"How Oregon Became a Linchpin for the Country's Drug Policies," by Maia Szalavitz
"A Study Finds 'No Evidence' That Decriminalization Boosted Drug-Related Deaths in Oregon," by Jacob Sullum
"Alcohol Prohibition Was a Dress Rehearsal for the War on Drugs," by Nick Gillespie
"Federal Government Will Borrow Another $20 Trillion in the Next Decade," by Eric Boehm
"Surging Immigration Will Reduce Deficits by $1 Trillion," by Eric Boehm
"How Increasing Immigration Can Reduce the Deficit," by Eric Boehm
"Debate: The U.S. Should Increase Funding for the Defense of Ukraine," by Cathy Young and Will Ruger
Reason's archive on "border crossings"
"Open Borders in America: A Look Back and Forward," by Ed Krayewski
"Politicians Need To Stop Pretending the National Debt Is Sustainable," by Veronique de Rugy
"Requiem for a Redneck: Mojo Nixon, 1957–2024," by Michael J. Socolow
"Oh, Mojo," by Matt Welch
"A Joe Biden (War on) Christmas," by Nick Gillespie, Meredith Bragg, and Austin Bragg
Send your questions to roundtable@reason.com. Be sure to include your social media handle and the correct pronunciation of your name.
Today's sponsor:
Audio production by Ian Keyser; assistant production by Hunt Beaty.
Music: "Angeline," by The Brothers Steve
The post Biden's Cognitive Shrinkflation appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>Reason's Nick Gillespie interviews Rachel Nuwer, author of I Feel Love: MDMA and the Quest for Connection in a Fractured World. The book is a history of the drug known as molly and ecstasy that the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) is currently evaluating as an aid in fighting PTSD.
Today's sponsors:
Watch the full video here and find a condensed transcript below.
Nick Gillespie: Why did you write I Feel Love?
Rachel Nuwer: There are really two answers to that. The first is a sort of common good answer, which is, there wasn't a book about MDMA. It's this huge cultural phenomenon. We're probably going to see it—well, hopefully see it—approved by the [Food and Drug Administration] for PTSD treatment within the next year. Yet, there wasn't a resource that brought all the information about this complex, nuanced drug together in one place. People needed to have that touchstone. There are just so many misconceptions about MDMA that I wanted to dispel those, not just for readers but also for myself.
The other part of that answer is a more personal one. It was the height of the pandemic. Like many people, I was kind of having a crisis. What am I doing with my life? Am I going in the right direction? And for me, that was really manifesting in worries over my career. I'd spent about a decade reporting about illegal wildlife trade, which is not a cheery topic. We're talking slaughtered rhinos and elephants. And there just weren't many hopeful stories there. And I really realized that I was looking for a change of pace, for a new intellectual and personal challenge, and MDMA turned out to be the answer.
Gillespie: And that helps explain the subtitle of the book, right? Which is?
Nuwer: "MDMA and the Quest for Connection in a Fractured World."
Gillespie: So this is like your pandemic baby?
Nuwer: This is exactly that. It's kept me very occupied in the pandemic. And my last book, I went to 12 countries to report it, but this one I could very easily do from the phone, right here in the good ol' U.S.A.—and a quick hop over the pond to the U.K.
Gillespie: We talk about the psychedelic renaissance at Reason and obviously other people do, but that might be one thing the pandemic really helped because you couldn't travel out. So travel in.
Nuwer: Exactly, yeah. And I say this in the beginning of the book, so it's not a surprise. But the idea for the book came to me while I was on MDMA, but not in a club, which is my preferred environment for this. I was just sitting on my couch at home at 7 p.m. on a Friday night.
Gillespie: Before we get into the conversation about the history of MDMA, I'm struck by you saying, "This came to me while I was on MDMA." As a broad cultural background, how old are you?
Nuwer: I am—let's see, what am I now? 38. Keeps changing.
Gillespie: Have you always felt comfortable saying, "I use drugs that are technically or still openly illegal." Have you always felt comfortable doing that? Or is there a shift going on in our society?
Nuwer: I was definitely not always the person who was like, "I use drugs. I like drugs." I was a D.A.R.E. kid from the '80s.
I completely swallowed that message. I internalized it. If I heard of friends doing drugs, whether it was weed or ecstasy, I looked down on them. I judged them. I thought people who do drugs are looking for an escape, or they're burnouts, or they're going to frazzle their brains. Wasn't for me. That began to change in college. I had a friend who introduced me to mushrooms, but I didn't really know anything about them. It didn't have the stigma attached to it like ecstasy did. So I was like, "Sure, I'll try a new thing." I love new experiences. And that was great. I really enjoyed it, but it didn't open my eyes to MDMA at all. I still had this negative connotation.
Gillespie: Is it because MDMA is engineered? MDMA is a pharmaceutical of some sort. It's a pill. It's not a naturally occurring thing.
Nuwer: I think for a lot of people that is absolutely the case. For me, I had a personal negative connotation. In my freshman year of college, a friend's brother committed suicide. And this is in my small town in Mississippi, and everyone blamed his use of ecstasy. They specifically said, "Chris, he was taking all this ecstasy. It made him so depressed, and he killed himself." So instead of looking at the underlying drivers of what led him to make that decision, everyone just pointed out the drug. My D.A.R.E. kid self said, "It must be this awful ecstasy thing. I'm never going to touch that."
Gillespie: Let's talk about the rediscovery of MDMA in the late '60s, early '70s. Lay out the history of MDMA. And for the people out there—you might know it as molly or ecstasy. But what is MDMA, and where did it come from?
Nuwer: That's a great disclaimer for everyone out there. Molly and ecstasy are the same thing. And they refer to what is supposed to be MDMA. Whether your street–bought molly or ecstasy is MDMA is another question. But they refer to the same thing. It's just a branding tactic. So, the history part of the book, surprisingly, was one of my favorite parts to write. My mom's a historian, but I'm not a history person myself, and I just really got into it cause there were so many unexpected twists and turns.
So, first of all, MDMA is a lot older than most people think. It was first patented, let's say, on Christmas Eve 1912 by the German pharmaceutical company Merck—a respected group. And they weren't looking for something to change people's brains. They were looking for a blood clotting agent, and MDMA was just a chemical intermediary on the steps they needed to get there.
Whether or not anyone at Merck actually tried it, we don't know. They've been really cagey about letting people into their archives. It seems like maybe they did. There are little hints here and there of chemists being like, "Hey, this is pretty interesting. Let's take a closer look." Fast forward to the 1950s. MDMA pops up in the U.S. for the first time. This is during the U.S. government's search for a chemical truth serum. So, let's figure out how we can control the minds of our enemies by conducting experiments on U.S. citizens to see how this goes.
Gillespie: So this is part of MKUltra, and it's the epiphenomenon of that?
Nuwer: It wasn't MKUltra itself, but yeah, it was the army's version of the CIA trials. Again, we don't have the sort of smoking gun evidence that MDMA was ever given to anyone under this experiment. But there's a lot of circumstantial evidence. People who have had more time than I have to pursue the Freedom of Information Act process have gotten really close to revealing that, indeed, the U.S. Army did do this.
A student named Nicholas Dunham—I think he's gotten his Ph.D. now, so, Dr. Nicholas Dunham—tracked down a document that pointed to Tulane University in New Orleans as having contracted with the army, and MDMA was on their list of drugs. But when Nick asked for the specific document from the U.S. government that would show whether or not it was actually given to anyone, they said, "Oh, we lost it".
So MDMA pops up again in police records of seizures in around 1970–1971, which probably just points to the fact that the Controlled Substances Act had just come out and had criminalized MDA—which is a closely related molecule—and entrepreneurial chemists were probably just looking for a way to get around the law by sticking an extra methyl group. Poof: MDMA. So, the police even thought that they were seizing MDA. But we don't know anything about those chemists. We don't know who their customers were. We don't know who was using it for what. What we do know is that MDMA comes up again in 1975 when a Ph.D. student at Berkeley named Carl Resnikoff got with his mentor there, a guy named Alexander Shulgin. Everyone calls him Sasha, a famous psychedelic chemist. And they were working on a summer project together.
Gillespie: And Shulgin is kind of the Thomas Edison of psychedelics.
Nuwer: That's the correct way of putting it. Incredible chemist. Invented, like, 20 molecules. He would test them on himself and his wife if they were interesting and share them with friends. Young Carl was really enamored with Shulgin and his work, because Carl had tried LSD when he was in eighth grade. He was all about it. And Shulgin said, "OK, you need to do a summer project. What do you want to do?" And Carl was a big fan of MDA—as we were talking about earlier—and thought, "OK, methamphetamine is more euphoric than plain amphetamine. The difference is this methyl group. Why don't I just stick the same methyl group onto MDA and see what happens?" It's pretty logical and Shulgin's like, "That's a great idea. Let's do it." So they hole up in the summer of 1975 at U.C. Berkeley and synthesized MDMA together, and Shulgin took most of it home. But he gave Carl a little baggie, measured out just perfectly. I think it was like 125 mg. Two doses. And Carl and his girlfriend Judith wound up taking it on a beautiful September day on a boat ride across the San Francisco Bay to Sausalito.
Gillespie: Sometimes MDMA is that drug you do by yourself or with a loved one or somebody you want to connect with. And when I say intimate, not necessarily sexual, but like a deep bond. And then, it becomes the ultimate rave. Well, actually, club drug first. And then rave drug. How does it start shifting out from that?
Nuwer: Well, back up just a step before that. So Shulgin did try MDMA after Carl reported back with very positive experiences in '76, and he realized this molecule's potential for therapy. He introduced it to a therapist friend of his who became sort of this—I guess people say the Johnny Appleseed of MDMA in the therapeutic community. So, it quietly started spreading among first Bay Area therapists and then broader around the U.S. and even internationally. But people were keeping really quiet about it, because a lot of these therapists had either worked with LSD in the preceding decades or knew exactly what had happened with LSD being criminalized. So, they knew that if word got out about this new psychoactive drug, it would absolutely be criminalized, just like LSD. And they didn't want that to happen because they were seeing such powerful results.
Gillespie: How did they use it in a therapeutic context?
Nuwer: There are some early studies from [George Greer and his wife Requa Tolbert] out of New Mexico. And at first, it's kind of funny, they were following the LSD model, but they were kind of just experimenting themselves with what worked and what didn't work. And, in those original trials, they would actually take MDMA with their clients, but they realized, "OK, we need to not be high on MDMA because we need to focus on you and not make this about us." So that stopped. But they would—kind of like the trials today—bring people to their house, give them a low or whatever dose they thought would be appropriate, and just let them work through whatever issue they were trying to work through.
Gillespie The idea is that it opens people up. It allows them to be in touch with their feelings and feel connected.
Nuwer: Exactly. Shulgin used the word "window." So it opens this window on yourself where you can find answers to questions you're asking your own self or partners, without fear, without anxiety, without the typical neuroses or clutter of our brain that gets in the way.
So yeah, people used it for all kinds of things, from couples counseling to just "I'm having this trouble at work. I want to work through that" to "I want to know myself deeper" to more serious things like trauma. So that was all going on through the '70s. But, as you said earlier, MDMA did make this jump from the therapist's couch to the dance floor. And, the Greers said to me at one point of the interview that it was inevitable that this was going to happen. It's a drug that makes you feel good. People want to take drugs that make you feel good. And there was a lot of tension between the recreational and the therapeutic community, just as there was with LSD years before.
Gillespie: We should point out that LSD, particularly during the '50s and early '60s to some degree, was being used widely by therapists, just to help treat things like alcoholism. Yesterday—while we're taping this—was Cary Grant's birthday. And Cary Grant is probably the best-known kind of celebrity who took LSD and publicly extolled its virtues, saying it made him feel alive again, etc. So MDMA is kind of an echo of that.
Nuwer: Exactly. It was really the LSD therapists that paved the way for MDMA to then just slot right into this empty pool that had been left by LSD being criminalized. And the thing is, at this time, MDMA is completely legal. The government isn't aware of it. So the therapeutic community, many of them wanted to keep it a secret, only a thing that friends tell friends. You can't, like, just spread it around a club. But there's also a different contingent of people who wanted to just release it on the world and also make a nice profit in doing so.
So the sort of figurehead of the recreational scene at this time was a guy named Michael Clegg. He ran a group that came to be known as the Texas Group because a lot of them were operating out of Dallas. And Michael Clegg just wanted to churn out as much MDMA as possible, as quickly as possible, making a lot of money. But he wasn't the typical drug lord that you think of, like, "I'm just going to get everyone hooked and make money." He had these ideas of himself as enlightened, wanting to serve a bigger purpose in the world and wanting to help people be saved, whatever that means to them. So that was Michael Clegg. He really spread MDMA across Texas, California, and the United States. And that is what attracted the attention of the U.S. government.
Gillespie: Right. So then what happened?
Nuwer: Well, the [Drug Enforcement Administration] moved to schedule MDMA. In the summer of '85—which is when I was born, coincidentally—MDMA was put on the emergency Schedule I list, and that meant that it was illegal. Well, the DEA, what they did not see coming—they thought this would just be a normal scheduling—is that there were all these therapists, professors at Harvard, who believed in MDMA and thought it was worthy of study and worthy of use. So this group of therapists, including Sasha Shulgin, put together a case to bring the DEA to court and say, "Hey, this is a drug with medical purpose, so it can't be Schedule I because Schedule I is defined as no medical purpose. It should be Schedule III. Allow us to work with it, allow us to study it, control it, but, you know, come on." And the really fascinating thing is they actually won that trial. The administrative law judge sided with them and said, "Yeah, you guys have shown that MDMA does indeed have value as a medicinal tool. It's being used by therapists. It should be Schedule III." But because of whatever bureaucracy—I don't understand the federal system—MDMA was put on Schedule I because that judge's determination was only a suggestion. So the DEA just did what they wanted to do the whole time.
Gillespie: I am old enough to have taken MDMA before it was illegal and after. I have a strong memory of it being—in the early '80s, before it was illegal—more of a reflective, introspective drug.
Post-prohibition, the biggest thing that was a problem about it was that it made you dangerously social, where you would go out and dance all night and kill yourself. Like you couldn't stop, you were part of a hive mind, which is just kind of bizarre.
So, talk about MAPS—the nonprofit that's been working since the '80s to bring MDMA-assisted psychotherapy for PTSD. How did they get involved and what role did they play in this world where MDMA has been banned?
Nuwer: So I'll say that we would not be where we are today in terms of MDMA-assisted therapy being on the cusp of potential federal approval if it were not for MAPS—the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies. MAPS was founded in 1986 by a guy named Rick Doblin. Rick was this kid who grew up outside Chicago, raised on stories around the family dinner table of the Holocaust. So Rick was this kid who was afraid that at any moment, all the people around him could just break out in like a maniacal genocide mode. And Rick really made it his mission in life—he's a strange kid, apparently—to find a solution for that. Just a strange guy, a very interesting and unique character. Rick wound up at New College in Florida, where he was introduced to drugs, and he thought that doing mind-melting doses of LSD was the way to enlightenment. He did not find the answers that route. But through those connections, he found his way to MDMA. And at first he thought it was like, "How profound could this drug be if you can still talk on it?" But he quickly realized for himself the utility of just being able to communicate with people in the open way we were talking about earlier, and he thought, "Huh, maybe this drug is the answer for getting people to set aside their differences and seeing that we're all just human. We all want love. We all want the same thing. We have more in common than we have different." Rick got involved in that DEA trial. He was one of the three younger people that was sort of spearheading the organizational effort: getting the money, getting a lawyer, and getting everyone to write letters.
After the trial, everyone gave up. Most people stopped using MDMA in their practice because they didn't want to lose their license. Rick was the one person who did not give up, and everybody thought, "You're an idiot. You're wasting your time. You're wasting your money. It's just a matter of time until you too see the writing on the wall. This is not coming back." But Rick just is very hardheaded, I guess, like the most tenacious person ever. And there was something that Rick actually learned at the trial. He was talking with one of the DEA agents who was representing the government and this guy, Frank Sapienza, told Rick, "Look, kid, there might be something to this MDMA thing, but you are never going to get anywhere with it unless you go through the federal route. You need to get approval. You need to do FDA trials, clinical trials, that's the way you have got to do it." And Rick really took that to heart. So he founded MAPS to see that through. And, you know, it's taken like 38-plus years
Gillespie: Where are they now for FDA approval of MDMA-assisted psychotherapy?
Nuwer: So, clinical trials have to have three phases. Phase one is just to show like, OK, this isn't going to kill like a bunch of rats and people. Phase two is more about efficacy and safety. And then phase three is the more rigorous, like, OK, does this work and is it safe? They have just completed the end of the phase three section. And again, this has taken literally 20-plus years. Rick was doing this all on fundraising, and it costs millions literally to do clinical trials. And also just jumping through all the paperwork and permission hoops of the government.
So the last phase three trial is done, and MAPS' Public Benefit Corporation, which has now become a pharmaceutical company, just submitted an application to the FDA at the end of December asking for a new drug approval for MDMA-assisted therapy for PTSD. So the FDA has a certain amount of time to respond. But long story short, hopefully there'll be some sort of answer by mid-2024. That's the year we are in now.
Gillespie: Parallel to MAPS trying to get MDMA in certain circumstances approved—what happened in the '80s and '90s and the aughts with MDMA? Timothy Leary once famously talked about how LSD escaped the CIA labs and went into the mainstream. MDMA certainly escaped any kind of lockdown on it. What was going on there?
Nuwer: A lot was going on. So in the late '80s, MDMA made its way to the U.K., which basically created raves because people wanted to keep partying after clubs closed, and hence raves. And raves in turn led to the multibillion-dollar electronic dance music industry that we have today. MDMA through that rave pathway became a global phenomenon. So like tons of people doing MDMA, mostly youngsters [at] warehouses, clubs, potentially dangerous environments. And we started to see our first MDMA deaths. Nothing like the number of alcohol deaths we see or [deaths we see from] other drugs, but a few deaths that would be overly covered in the news.
Gillespie: And this is from people taking too much and having cardiac events or dehydrating and kind of dancing themselves to death.
Nuwer: I mean, hyperthermia was the main one. Overheating. So MDMA became this hysterical news story. "Ecstasy is killing our children." It was seen as this threat to sort of puritanical American and likewise British values. So there were tons of just really severe laws that came down banning it.
Gillespie: Joe Biden was involved in the Rave Act.
Nuwer: Oh, yeah. Trying to criminalize pacifiers and glow sticks as drug paraphernalia, for example. But what that did is it really tarnished MDMA's reputation. Almost in the same way as LSD's reputation was tarnished by being attached to the counterculture. It was like a political strategy to try to take this drug down. And, at the same time, the U.S. government especially was pumping money into studies to prove that MDMA was neurotoxic, that it impacted the brain in a detrimental way. Millions of dollars of federal funding went into labs literally trying to prove this. And in the end, they didn't approve it because MDMA really isn't neurotoxic. It, of course, can be dangerous if you take too much. But, the lasting effect of that, from the late '80s and through the '90s and even early aughts, was that MDMA's reputation was really tainted. Any public understanding or awareness of its therapeutic value was completely paved over by this negative connotation. And it's that kind of connotation that I grew up with in the '80s.
Gillespie: It's kind of flipped, right? Because there was that story, but then people were like, you know what? I feel really good on this or I've had good experiences. When did things seem to start tipping away?
Nuwer: Yeah, I absolutely agree. Well, I can tell you my personal experience of when I flipped. So I wrote this book proposal during the pandemic, like I told you, and my agent sent it out to a bunch of editors, and we got all no's. People were saying Michael Pollan already wrote this book, because they just don't understand the difference between a mushroom and MDMA or whatever. Other people were saying this book looks too positive about ecstasy. Why isn't this about the negative effects of ecstasy? And others were saying there's just not enough there to say anything about ecstasy; this isn't a book project. Then the first MAPS phase three study came out. I wrote about it for The New York Times. Suddenly, the conversation just shifted in this really significant way. I started getting interest in the book proposal. I really think that that trial kind of legitimized MDMA and put it out there in the broader public understanding in a way that wasn't present before.
Gillespie: What are the benefits of the MAPS approach, of going through FDA approval and showing that this is a medicine?
Nuwer: I have heard people who are more part of the underground scene, and they're afraid that, oh, this is going to make MDMA less cool if it's suddenly this medicine or, oh, we're sterilizing the industry. I'm just remembering a comment from Ben Sessa, who is a psychiatrist in the U.K. and also works with MDMA and other drugs like this. He's like, "You know, I can put on my white coat and then I can go to a rave, you know, whatever. It doesn't make MDMA less cool, but this is what we have to do to legitimize it, to eventually move toward hopefully legality, not just for therapeutic uses but also for recreational uses or whatever people want to do." And that's going to make these things safer in the end, because then we're going to know where we're getting our drugs. We're going to know how to take them. We're going to have education about how to use them properly.
Gillespie: This is almost always the case with what the government calls illicit drugs—not even illegal, they're immoral—not knowing what's in them, which is hard to do in black markets because dealers don't spend a lot of time putting labels on stuff. What's the role of the rave culture in kind of popularizing ecstasy?
Nuwer: I think hearing your friends or people you trust say, "Hey, I tried this thing and not only was it the most fun night I've ever had, it also was a profoundly beautiful experience." That's actually how I found my way to this drug. My now husband was a '90s raver kid in Colorado going out to warehouses. And when I met him, I still had these negative connotations about ecstasy. And then hearing his stories—and he was by no means trying to push me into this, he was done with MDMA—I was finally just like, I want to try this too. It sounds really fun. And I think that we really look over or we don't give the rave scene its due credit. Millions and millions of people around the world have tried MDMA. Millions of them have had profound, beautiful, wonderful experiences on it. Yet there's very little rigorous attention paid to them by the scientific community. There's just no funding or interest to study them. Because the government is providing them most of the funding. And people aren't dying en masse like they are with meth or some other drug. So I think there's just so many interesting questions to be mined there and stories to be heard.
Gillespie: And then you have kind of underground movements that come above ground. Burning Man is not certainly exclusively about MDMA, but that's part of the culture and the rave element of that or the Electric Daisy Carnival.
Nuwer: Definitely. I mean, I think it really serves the purpose of these gatherings in the past that we could rely on from religion or mystical gatherings or whatever that we're really missing today. And people are seeking that out. I know that's why I like to go to raves. In terms of what it's actually doing, I mean, massive dumps of serotonin. It not only blocks your receptors in your brain from taking up serotonin, which is the sort of jack-of-all-trades neurotransmitter, it does all kinds of things. But, your neurons actually dump out their stores of serotonin. Something like 80 percent of your serotonin floods your brain on a night of MDMA, or a day. Oxytocin gets triggered as well. So there's just this whole chemical formula that's going on in your brain to produce that feeling.
Gillespie: How do you think MDMA specifically fits into the larger kind of resurgence of psychedelics?
Nuwer: Well, I do think that MDMA is paving the way through this potential FDA approval. I think all things look good for MDMA to be the first psychedelic over that finish line. So that is absolutely major. You know, returning to that stigma and that taint we talked about in the '90s and 2000s, I think that was a really big obstacle to overcome, in a way that mushrooms didn't have to overcome because they just didn't have that same negative connotation that MDMA or LSD had. I mean, you never hear anything about LSD. Hardly at all. MDMA I hear less about than I hear mushrooms. I was reading U.C. Berkeley's newsletter today, The Microdose. It's like, oh, Indiana's moving to invest dollars in psilocybin research on PTSD and this and that. But the states aren't as eager to do MDMA—I think it is the connotations, the stigma from earlier decades. And also referring back to that synthetic issue that you mentioned, for some reason people are more comfortable with a natural substance than one that was made.
Gillespie: Legalizing nature, there are a lot of movements to just save plant-based entheogens or certain types of psychedelics. Maybe it's that they're harder to regulate because they could grow anywhere. I think it's an artificial distinction between nature and artifice.
Nuwer: Yeah, I 100 percent agree with that. But, at the same time, I think MDMA is just such a useful and powerful tool for therapy just because it's such an easier medicine to work with.
Gillespie: Why does there seem to be so much interest in this? I mean, it's definitely changing. The laws seem to be changing, and there's a cultural moment where a lot of serious people are talking about this.
Nuwer: I think it's a complex mix. So I think people are just fed up with the war on drugs. They're beginning to realize just how idiotic it was, that there's no way to win this war, just what a waste of money and lives and environment, the list goes on.
I think people also have come to realize that the quick chemical fix that we were hoping would come through psychiatric drugs isn't working. There are more and more people suffering from things like depression, anxiety, trauma. So we're looking for other answers. And then a little bit more cynically, I think people like the idea of this magic wand cure-all. And they're just like, "Psychedelics are going to rid me of all my problems."
Gillespie: They're going to do what Prozac failed to do.
Nuwer: Exactly. And people want to believe in these magic cures. And it's not going to be that for most people.
Gillespie: A parallel with MAPS, they're a bit behind, but Compass Pathways, a pharmaceutical company, is pushing psilocybin trials for depression and anxiety with the FDA. Is that a good sign or a bad sign that the big pharmaceutical companies are kind of starting to circle around this?
Nuwer: I think, unfortunately, it was just inevitable. It's great that they're pushing trials through to get these medications to people. The monetization of it isn't great, but this is the system we live in. And I don't think that psychedelics were ever going to be able to reform the system.
Rick Doblin was hoping that he could get MDMA over the finish line with charity alone. And I mean, incredibly, he raised $140 million in donations. And then he even says himself that he was sort of a victim of his own success because by helping bring the psychedelic renaissance about through MAPS, suddenly we have these companies like Compass popping up that are for-profit. And then donors are like, why would I give you free money that I'm not going to see a return on when I can make an investment over here? So MAPS isn't going to make it over the finish line with MDMA as a philanthropy-funded product. They just spun out a pharmaceutical arm that is for-profit. They have a board. They have investors. They tried really hard not to. But this is just the system that we live in.
Gillespie: Do you see any big obstacles in the next couple of years to the medicalization or legalization of these substances?
Nuwer: I'm sure there's going to be some kind of bureaucratic whatever. I mean, there's a lot of positive signs from the federal government that they're into this. Biden released a memo about it. There's language in a new bill about veterans for investigating this. But the government is very, very conservative. So I can see there being all kinds of hitches that delay this, like, years.
This interview has been condensed and edited for style and clarity.
The post Rachel Nuwer: MDMA Is On the Cusp of Legalization appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>In this week's The Reason Roundtable, editors Matt Welch, Katherine Mangu-Ward, Nick Gillespie, and Peter Suderman counter the twisted logic of former President Donald Trump's recent claim that he would raise tariffs on all Chinese imports if he were to retake the White House.
00:24—Trump proposes more tariffs
15:24—Bidenomics and the weird economy
30:49—Weekly Listener Question
44:22—Senate hearing on social media harms
52:41—This week's cultural recommendations
Mentioned in this podcast:
"Can Free Markets Win Votes in the New GOP?" by Stephanie Slade
"David Stockman on Why Trump Can't Fix the Debt: 'This Guy Is Part of the Swamp,'" by Nick Gillespie
"Josh Hawley Thinks the White House Can Force an Aluminum Plant To Stay Open," by Eric Boehm
"On Economic Issues, the Populist Right and Left Share a Lot of Common Ground," by Veronique de Rugy
"The Bankruptcy of Bidenomics," by Peter Suderman
"Biden Considering Higher Tariffs on E.V.s Imported from China, Raising Prices for Americans," by Joe Lancaster
"Protectionism Ruined U.S. Steel," by Eric Boehm
"Americans Unhappy With Politicians They'll Soon Vote Back Into Office," by J.D. Tuccille
"How Will Reason Staffers Vote in 2020?" by Reason staff
"Who's Getting Your Vote?: Reason's Revealing Presidential Poll," by Reason staff
"Why Are Political Journalists More Scared of Revealing Their Votes Than Baseball Writers?" by Matt Welch
"Why Aren't Other Journalism Outlets Disclosing Their Presidential Votes?" by Matt Welch
"Show Us Your Vote!" by Matt Welch
"Mark Zuckerberg Is Not a Murderer, Mr. Senator," by Robby Soave
"Mark Zuckerberg Is Calling for Regulation of Social Media To Lock in Facebook's Position," by Nick Gillespie
"Is True Detective the Most Libertarian Show on TV?" by Nick Gillespie
"Enthusiasm, Curbed," by Nick Gillespie
"All Culture, All the Time," by Nick Gillespie
Send your questions to roundtable@reason.com. Be sure to include your social media handle and the correct pronunciation of your name.
Today's sponsors:
Audio production by Ian Keyser; assistant production by Hunt Beaty.
Music: "Angeline," by The Brothers Steve
The post Trump's Terrible, Popular Tariffs appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>As Ronald Reagan's first budget director, former Michigan congressman David Stockman led the charge to cut the size, scope, and spending of the federal government in the early 1980s. He made enemies among Democrats by pushing hard for cuts to welfare programs—and he ultimately made enemies among his fellow Republicans by pushing equally hard to slash defense spending. His memoir of the era, The Triumph of Politics: Why the Reagan Revolution Failed, is a legendary account of how libertarian principles got sacrificed on the altar of political expediency.
Stockman's new book is Trump's War on Capitalism, and it takes a blowtorch to the former president's time in office. "When it comes to what the GOP's core mission should be…standing up for the free markets, fiscal rectitude, sound money, personal liberty, and small government at home and non-intervention abroad," he writes, "Donald Trump has overwhelmingly come down on the wrong side of the issues."
At a Reason Speakeasy event in New York City, I talked with Stockman about his political journey from being a member of Students for a Democratic Society who protested the Vietnam War to being one of Reagan's main advisers to his denunciation of Donald Trump and his hope that Robert F. Kennedy Jr.'s candidacy helps throw the 2024 election into the House of Representatives.
Stockman also explains how Trump led the disastrous charge on COVID-19 lockdowns, got rolled by Wall Street and the Federal Reserve, and why his nativist views on immigration are inimical both to freedom and economic growth.
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The post David Stockman: Trump's War on Capitalism and Freedom appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>As Ronald Reagan's first budget director, former Michigan congressman David Stockman led the charge to cut the size, scope, and spending of the federal government in the early 1980s. He made enemies among Democrats by pushing hard for cuts to welfare programs—and he ultimately made enemies among his fellow Republicans by pushing equally hard to slash defense spending. His memoir of the era, The Triumph of Politics: Why the Reagan Revolution Failed, is a legendary account of how libertarian principles got sacrificed on the altar of political expediency.
Stockman's new book is Trump's War on Capitalism, and it takes a blowtorch to the former president's time in office. "When it comes to what the GOP's core mission should be…standing up for the free markets, fiscal rectitude, sound money, personal liberty, and small government at home and non-intervention abroad," he writes, "Donald Trump has overwhelmingly come down on the wrong side of the issues."
At a Reason Speakeasy event in New York City, Reason's Nick Gillespie talked with Stockman about his political journey from being a member of Students for a Democratic Society who protested the Vietnam War to being one of Reagan's main advisers to his denunciation of Donald Trump and his hope that Robert F. Kennedy Jr.'s candidacy helps throw the 2024 election into the House of Representatives.
Stockman also explains how Trump led the charge on COVID lockdowns, got rolled by Wall Street and the Federal Reserve, and why his nativist views on immigration are inimical both to freedom and economic growth.
Watch the full video here and find a condensed transcript below.
Nick Gillespie: This is The Reason Interview with Nick Gillespie. Thanks so much for coming out. Our guest tonight is David Stockman. He is a former congressman, a two-termer from Michigan, south of Grand Rapids. Probably best known in the public eye for being Ronald Reagan's first budget director who made the naive, idealistic, and absolutely wonderful mistake of believing that Ronald Reagan wanted to cut the size, scope, and spending of government across the board. He wanted to cut the welfare-warfare state, right?
David Stockman: Well, the welfare part.
Gillespie: And this is before we get into his fantastic book, a real stinging critique of Donald Trump, Trump's War on Capitalism. In preparing for this, you as budget director, you came in and you had to cut $40 billion from a $700 billion budget in 1981. To give you a sense of how quaint that is, the defense budget now is about $700 billion. I think we may be approaching that just in interest on the debt. But you were scrounging around to find $40 billion to cut. What happened?
Stockman: Well, I think the problem was Ronald Reagan believed in small government profoundly, except for the Pentagon side of the Potomac River. And he was really a hawk, a real, unreformed, unrequited Cold War hawk. The defense budget was about $140 billion when we got there. By the time he left, it was $350 billion, a massive increase on the theory that the Soviet Union was developing first-strike capability. None of that was true. That was the origination of the whole neocon view of the world. That's where all these characters originally got their start in the process. And so, by the time we got to 1988, the defense budget had eaten up and then some of all the domestic cuts, and the Republicans who were willing to stand up for domestic spending cuts and title reforms and so forth were so demoralized by seeing these massive increases year after year for the Pentagon that they basically threw in the towel, and the whole thing was kind of a wipeout.
If you want to get the numbers on it, just to kind of cap off the point, when Jimmy Carter left the White House after all those years of big spending by the Democrats, first Carter and then before him, of course, [Lyndon B. Johnson (LBJ)], and guns and butter and all the rest, the domestic non-defense budget was 15.4 percent of [gross domestic product (GDP)]. So way up, historically. When Reagan left, it was 15.3 percent. So he made a 0.1 percent difference. And that's about all we got.
Gillespie: I would recommend everybody read, The Triumph of Politics, David's memoir of his time. The subtitle is Why the Reagan Revolution Failed and—if you're interested in political economy as well as gossip—it's really one of the great memoirs.
But the book we're talking about tonight is Trump's War on Capitalism. The title says it so well there isn't even a subtitle. Why don't you start by telling us what was Trump's war on capitalism? He is a businessman. He talked about having the greatest, the biggest, the best economy ever when he was president. What's the essence of Trump's war on capitalism?
Stockman: Well, the question I think you're getting at is, why did I write it? And the answer is I had already written three books trying to expose the fact that Donald Trump isn't remotely an economic conservative; he doesn't believe in small government. I don't think he believes in free markets. And certainly he had no affinity whatsoever for sound money or fiscal rectitude. So in 2016, I wrote a book called Trumped! to warn people. In 2018, I wrote another book called Peak Trump to say I was right. In 2020, I wrote a third book called Dump Trump. Well, the fourth time would be the charm, right? And the book came out five days before the Iowa primaries. It was too late. But there is a bigger point to it, and that is: We're never going to get the kind of government, I think, that all of us believe in—the kind of society, the kind of liberty, the kind of economic prosperity, the kind of market capitalism and so forth. Unless there is an honest contest in the process of democratic governance in the United States between one party that more or less lines up as the government party, the party of state, the party of the political class, the bureaucratic class, the apparatchiks in Washington. And there's a second party that represents the hinterlands and all of the impulses that go with us, to leave us alone, to tax us less, to spend less, to intervene less, to get out of our way, to allow the private society and economy to breathe. So we really need a government party contesting with an anti-government party.
The problem is, today we have a uni-party in terms of the primary leadership in the Republican Party in Washington. When I look at [Mitch] McConnell, who's been there 55 years on the government payroll, I can't really tell any difference between him and our senator from New York, the leader on the Democratic side. And so, what I think the great danger is that the problems in the United States today in terms of our position in the world—which is a disaster in terms of our public debt but we can get into a lot of those numbers in a minute—and in terms of a rogue central bank that is totally out of control is that, if we don't address any of that, then [we will have continued rule of the uni-party], and we can't have [that]. We need to break it up. But Donald Trump, despite all of his rhetoric and all of his loud boasting about draining the swamp and being the outsider and coming in to clean up the whole thing, is just as much a statist when it comes to all the key issues. And we go through them in the book, as well as most of the mainstream politicians in Washington.
So the last thing we need is a fight in 2024 between Trump and Biden. It's pointless. It's useless. We need to have a clean break in the Republican Party, blow it up if we have to, and not allow the second party in our democracy to be Trumpified. Because if it's Trumpified, then we get more of what we had during the four years that he was there. I've got a lot of data on that, but let me just cap it here with one, and then we can go into some of the details. When Trump was sworn in, the public debt was $20 trillion already, and it had been swelling rapidly for several decades. When he left, it was close to $28 trillion. So let's just call it $8 trillion in four years. Now, someone might ask later, numbers of this magnitude are almost hard to grasp, to understand, but here's how to understand: The first $8 trillion, equivalent to the $8 trillion that Trump racked up in four years, had taken from the first day of the Republic to 2005 to approve. That is, the first 43 presidents in 216 years generated $8 trillion in public debt. Trump replicated that in four years, not only because of huge tax cuts that he didn't try to offset with spending but because of the whole disaster of the pandemic, the COVID, the lockdowns, and $6.5 trillion worth of bailout and relief and free stuff that came out of the effort to try to tell people, "Yeah, we're sending everybody home. And don't worry, we'll send you money too." So, that's the heart of the matter.
Anybody that can generate $8 trillion in four years of additional public debt, equal to the first 43 presidents—and there were some real rascals, obviously, and bad guys in that lineup, including [Franklin D. Roosevelt] and LBJ and a lot of others in between—that's the kind of number that grasps you by the collar and tells you, this guy is part of the swamp. He's not part of the solution.
Gillespie: What is wrong with running up massive debt?
Stockman: Someone asked me that in 1970 when I first went to work on Capitol Hill. I ran for Congress in 1976 against the outgoing [Gerald] Ford deficits, which were large. And the question was raised, and here we are. And it's now $34 trillion and rising and so, maybe it's no problem after all.
No, the answer is there are two ways to finance the deficit, both of them bad. The first way is the honest way: You finance it in the bond pits by borrowing out of the private savings stream. The effect of that, though, everybody understood when I was first on Capitol Hill in the '70s and into the early '80s, is that when you finance the public debt deficits the honest way, it causes crowding out. It forces up interest rates higher and higher, because whatever the given supply of savings is at the moment. Uncle Sam is the sheriff. His elbows get first call on the money. Crowding out happens. Rates go up. That's where we got the famous bond vigilantes and so forth. And that's why, actually, when we were trying to cut taxes in the early '70s, what I called the College of Cardinals—the established, seasoned Republican leaders in the House: Bob Dole, Sen. [Pete] Domenici, Howard Baker, who was the Senate leader—they said, "No, we've got to be careful here, because if we finance all of these tax cuts with red ink and borrowing, we're going to crowd out private investment. We're about to hear from our car dealers who can't finance their lot. We're going to hear from our home builders whose customers can't get mortgages," and so on. So the point is, if you finance it the honest way, you cause crowding out, you get an early reaction economically. You basically suppress productive investment and you shift society's resources to "government investment"—if you think that's a word, and I don't. I think it's an oxymoron.
The honest way of financing the deficits, which by the way, had to be done in the late '70s and early '80s because Paul Volcker was sitting in the chair at the Fed, and he was not about to monetize the debt. As a result, we had an environment in which the political reaction function, the feedback, was almost instantaneous. Run big deficits, drive up interest rates in the bond pits. Those spread to the banking sector. Those spread to the hometown car dealers and homebuilders and SNL bankers and just regular consumers. And it causes a political reaction that tends to create a constituency in the political system in Congress for reining in the deficit. That's the first way.
The second way is to issue all kinds of public paper and have the central bank buy it. And that's called monetization. And that's exactly what we've been doing ever since the late '70s or late '80s, effectively after Volcker left. And let me just give you some idea of how much has been monetized. When [Alan] Greenspan took over, and you remember, this is 1987, he was allegedly at one time a great believer in the gold standard and an Ayn Rand disciple and other things. He sort of lost his economic rigidities. He was kind of nerdy. But in any event, the balance sheet of the Fed was $200 billion, and this is 1987. So it has something like 70 years of the Fed's existence. It had taken 70 years to get to $200 billion. And I'm going to talk a lot about the balance sheet of the Fed and people say, "What does that mean? Why is that such a big deal?" The balance sheet of the Fed is simply the track record of how much cumulative money they seized out of thin air and printed, fiat credit, over time. So we had $200 billion.
To cut this story short, until they decided that inflation was out of control about a year ago and began to pull back, the balance sheet of the Fed had reached $9 trillion. Now, this is in a lifetime. I am looking out here, I can see probably quite a few people that might have been around in 1987. You went from $200 billion to that $9 trillion. That's 45 times growth in that period of time—several decades—at a point when the GDP was only increasing by 5x.
So when the money printed by the Fed goes up 45 times and the size of the economy goes up five times, you are way, way, way, out of kilter, out of skew. And it is that massive, continuous money printing which monetized all of the debt being created by a reckless Congress and White House that allowed us to continue to run these huge budget deficits year after year. But eventually it catches up with you as well.
There's this famous thing, I think it's Hemingway's book where he's asked, "How did you go bankrupt?" And the answer was, "Slowly at first, then all of a sudden." What I'm trying to get at here is the honest way to finance the deficit will cause problems very quickly. What we're doing is the slow way, but we've created massive financial bubbles. Massive misallocation of resources, tremendous amounts of speculation that should never happen in a healthy economy and wouldn't happen. And it's permitted this to go on much longer than would have been the case if we had done it the honest way. But, now we're at the point where I think the chickens are coming home to roost. Even the Fed has stopped printing money because inflation was out of control.
Gillespie: So to bring it back to Trump, Trump made a big deal about caring about the forgotten man, talking about Main Street vs. Wall Street, all of that. Your book makes the case that whatever he's saying, he's actually helping Wall Street or the financial sector far more than production sectors and service sectors of the economy. Talk a little bit about his tariffs and his immigration policy. He's trying to help small producers, saying we're going to keep China from dumping cheap products here so you can have your industry here. Why is that wrong?
Stockman: The big irony about Trump is that he was the outsider who campaigned against the status quo, the establishment, the deep state, and the political class. And that all made for good rhetoric, and it actually resonated with the public. But when you look at what his policy solutions are, they have nothing to do with draining the swamp. Trump's basic take on why all these people were left high and dry in flyover America and in the Rust Belt, and why we lost millions and millions of jobs, and why manufacturing is going to China and elsewhere is that this was all due to the work of nefarious foreigners. Foreign governments that were cheating and unfair in their trade practices. Immigrants coming across the border in hordes, who were allegedly bloating our welfare state and undermining our economy and undermining our security.
Gillespie: That's always the great thing, right? Immigrants are simultaneously coming here for welfare and then outworking us.
Stockman: Yeah. But see, the point is if you want to drain the swamp, then you better go to the swamp and change the policies. Ask what has caused all of this disorder, distrust, and failure. That would have pointed exactly to the Federal Reserve because it's been pro-inflation since the '70s. And then it made inflation official with its 2 percent target. And it was that pro-inflation policy decade after decade that priced out the world market. It's that simple.
I look at one statistic that I've got in the book that looks at the cumulative increase in unit labor costs over the decades. And that's important because remember what unit labor costs are: It's when wage cost increases—benefits and pay—[while productivity remains the same or decreases]. Because if you have wage increases and you have equal productivity gains, then the cost of production doesn't change. And a business can go on and expand and thrive without raising the prices. But if wages are increasing dramatically, more rapidly than productivity, because you have a pro-inflation policy being run by the central bank, then over time, unit labor costs get totally out of control. And here's a startling number: From 1970 when we basically flushed sound money down the drain at Camp David—in 1971, actually, [Richard] Nixon [was president]—from then until the present, unit labor costs in the United States have risen 275 percent. And as a result of that, we have priced ourselves out of the services market because all of the services have gone to India and other low-wage countries, to say nothing of the merchandise goods market that has gone to Mexico and China and so forth.
I have one little thing in the book that gives a pretty good example. IBM was the great monster, the midway at one point in terms of making the computer hardware, which is the modern economy. But between 1990 and the present, their employment in India has gone from zero to about 180,000, and their employment in the United States has been cut by more than a third. So, that's on the services side to say nothing of what happened to these massive year-in, year-out, merchandise trade deficits. Why did that happen? It all happened because of the unit labor costs increasing at these rates. It happened because you had a pro-inflation rather than a pro-deflation central bank. And ironically, it happened because Milton Friedman gave Richard Nixon—tricky Dick, as we all fondly call him—some very bad advice. He said, "OK, we're going to unlink the dollar from its base, from its link to gold. But don't worry about that, because the free market will take care of exchange rates." And what that really meant was that if we inflated too much domestically, relative to the rest of the world, our exchange rate would go down. All of a sudden, the imports would cost a lot more, our exports would be less competitive, and there would be a disciplining mechanism, a braking mechanism that would prevent huge increases in the trade deficit and the offshoring of production. And that's what Friedman told Nixon. Now, in theory, he was probably right, but in practice, he was utterly wrong, because what happened over the last five decades is all the central banks in the world have engaged in dirty floats. And so there never was a free market.
Gillespie: Could you explain what a dirty float is?
Stockman: A dirty float basically says, rather than let the market clear in terms of the exchange rate between, say, the dollar and the yen, or the dollar and the euro, or the dollar and Mexican peso, the central bank stepped in and tried to peg the exchange rate. They believe if they peg their exchange rates low, it'll help their export factories. It'll help jobs. It'll help prosperity. They can export more to the rest of the world. That's called mercantilism. And what the Fed has done after 1971 is spread a massive monetary disease in the world called mercantilist monetary policy. I've got a lot of examples in the book of why we've lost so much production and jobs to Mexico—and to say nothing of China. [This is all] basically because the Fed said it's OK to manipulate your currency. It's OK to increase your domestic money supply at huge unsustainable rates because we're doing the same thing here. And so as we flooded the world with fiat dollars, the Fed's balance sheet went—as I said, just in that short period of time—from $200 billion to $9 trillion. The rest of the world, these other central banks, but particularly the Asian ones and also the Persian Gulf, oil Petro central banks, bought in dollars hand over fist. But the secret in that whole thing is when they were buying dollars to keep their exchange rate from rising, they were basically selling their own currency to the domestic market. In other words, the Fed was exporting inflation, and the other central banks reciprocated by buying up the dollars and inflating their own money supplies.
Now, why am I going into all this? Because that meant that what Friedman said [about] the automatic adjustment mechanism of the free market in exchange rates was short-circuited. It was blocked. And so the adjustment never came, and as a result, from 1974 onward, we have not had one year of a trade surplus. And it's gotten worse and worse. And over that period of time, it was $15 trillion of cumulative trade deficits. And if you even throw in the surplus on services that we have in the world, it's still $11 trillion over the last 40 years. Is 11 trillion a big number? Well, if you put it in today's purchasing power, it's $20 trillion.
Therefore, basically, we have borrowed $20 trillion from the rest of the world to keep this whole game going. So this is how we got into the mess, on trade. And this is why Trump, as I say in the book, had it totally upside down. The problem was, he would tell you, these nefarious evildoers in the U.S. Trade Administration or in the Commerce Department or lobbyists sneaking around the banks of the Potomac that made bad trade deals and gave away the store with all of our competitors. And that's why we're in such a big mess. And that if you put a guy who really knows how to negotiate—for instance, not pay his bills, which is one of his negotiating techniques—if you put a tough guy like me in the Oval Office, I'll negotiate good trade deals. And before you know it, everything is going to be better. Well, he negotiated NAFTA, as you all remember. There was a lot of hoopla about that. Basically, if you look at it, it just got a new name. Nothing changed. And secondly, if you look at what happened to the deficit with Mexico, it doubled—
Gillespie: And is that a bad thing, though? I mean, he renegotiated NAFTA. We kind of got worse terms on some level, but we got more stuff cheaply.
Stockman: Well, yes. I think that's true. But there's a certain kind of libertarian free market and free trade that ignores the monetary side. There is this point I used to make, and I think half of it's valid and the other half isn't. The point we used to make in the '70s and '80s was, well, if other countries are stupid enough to fill their harbors with rocks and figuratively stop trade, why should we reciprocate and be as stupid as they are? Therefore, if they want to subsidize their exports like the Chinese or others, more power to them because they're basically transferring wealth to our consumers; domestic welfare is better off, and so that's fine. Well, that's half of the equation. But the other half of the equation is that when you have a net export imbalance of $20 trillion over a period of time, you have exported a huge amount of your production base to the rest of the world. And unless you can keep borrowing at higher and higher rates, that isn't sustainable as an economic matter first, but as a political matter.
And this is the point. And you may think it sounds a little flippant, but I don't think it is. I think that Milton Friedman was the godfather of Donald Trump, because Milton Friedman basically told Nixon, "Sever the link to gold"—I'm the gold standard man, I think you might have noticed that—and [that] we don't need to worry about the ancient relic or barbarous relic or whatever [John Maynard] Keynes called it, because we have a market—a free market that'll set the exchange rates right. Well, he was wrong about that. We exported massive amounts of our industrial base. We created a burned-out zone in much of the Rust Belt, the upper Midwest, Pennsylvania; New England was long gone. I was from the auto state of Michigan, and you know that was totally burned out. But where did Trump get elected in 2016? On the margin, he got elected in the Rust Belt precincts of Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin, Iowa, in all the places that got left behind because we had an unsustainable set of economics with the rest of the world. And it was caused by the central bank that Friedman was willing to let free.
Now, of course, Friedman thought that all of the central bankers, that is, the members of the Fed, would be just like him. They would be Milton Friedman clones, and they would be very punctilious about the rate at which they were expanding Fed credit, and he had all kinds of rules of thumb and so forth. But of course, that was a pipe dream. That was naive. People who would get appointed to the Fed are basically there to do the business either of Washington politicians or Wall Street speculators.
I'm not really trying to trash Milton Friedman because he's a great hero—in terms of free markets and the understanding of the rudiments of a free society, you can't beat Milton Friedman. But the problem is he had a view of central banking and a view of the Federal Reserve that I think was totally wrong and that became the fulcrum for all of these things that happened.
Gillespie: Whatever has been going on in terms of economic growth has been bad for a while, but you talk a lot about TARP—how at the end of the Bush administration and the beginning of the Obama ones, handouts to automakers were locked into place. But could you talk a little bit about how Trump did something similar with COVID? Is part of the problem that these parts of the American economy get wiped out because they're not allowed to change and adapt because they get various kinds of programs that are designed to help them make it through to the next paycheck?
Stockman: Yeah. That's kind of the problem of crony capitalism. For anybody that might be interested, I wrote a 640-page book on that whole topic that was released in 2013. But I think the issue that we need to find a way to understand is that everything goes back to central banking. And when the central bank makes it so easy to borrow money, we end up with an economy that when Greenspan left or got there, there was about $10 trillion of total debt on the economy, public and private. And that was less than 200 percent of GDP. Today it's $96 trillion. In other words, they have kept interest rates so low, they've had such deep and long-lasting financial repression that the economy has become a giant [leveraged buyout (LBO)]. And when you do an LBO—I was in the private equity business, so I know—there can be prosperity for a couple of years. But if things don't work out right, you're going to have interest payments that begin.
Gillespie: To bring it back to Trump's specific policies, he came into office saying he was not only going to stop illegal immigration, but he was going to cut legal immigration in half. What is bad about that? Why is that part of the war on capitalism?
Stockman: Essentially, it raises a whole issue of supply-side policy. And I was a supply-sider back in the 1980s with Reagan. And then I got run out of the supply side church because I didn't follow all the precepts exactly.
The issue that we have today, as to why growth has been so tepid and why living standards have sort of stagnated, why there are so many very alienated people out there in flyover America wanting to get behind Trump—the reason that this has been happening is because we've got huge deficiencies on the supply side of our economy in terms of labor and capital investment. You know, the native-born work force is actually shrinking. It peaked in 2015, and it's shrinking. And that's because, for whatever reasons, native-born women and families are not having babies. And so our labor force is shrinking, and since historically half of GDP growth has been labor—the other half is productivity—our economy is grinding to a halt because the labor supply is shrinking, unless we allow immigrants who want to work to come here and become part of the work force.
I got a number that I think is kind of startling when you hear about the flood of immigrants coming in and that we're being overrun and how America's being somehow turned upside down. If you go to 1870, we finally got out of the Civil War and all the chaos that generated. There were only 39 million people left in America—north, south, all the states after the union reunited. Over the next 40 years to the eve of World War I, we had 25 million immigrants. So, relative to the population in 1870, the immigrant population in a few decades was two-thirds of the population to begin with. Now, how many immigrants do we have today? We have legal immigrants of about a little over a million. We have a population of 335 million people. So immigration today is less than one-third of 1 percent [of the population], not 66 percent or 60 percent.
That's the first point. The second point is we have a totally broken, ridiculous, immigration policy that comes right out of the swamp in Washington, and if Trump really understood what he was saying when he said, "I'm going to drain the swamp," the first thing you would do would be to change the basis for immigration. To get here, you either have to be a family unification, which is about 400,000 out of the million, or you have to be a Ph.D. or some high-tech skilled worker to get a couple hundred thousand more slots, or, and this is the big or, you have to be a refugee or an asylee. That's the only way that unskilled workers can get into the United States today, when we desperately need unskilled and low-skilled workers, because our native work force is declining.
In the last year that the data is available, 2022, only 4,000 green cards were issued under the category of things called E3 and E6, for unskilled workers; 4,000 out of the 1,118,000 legal immigrants that got here, to say nothing of the hordes littered on the border. Now, the hordes on the border, if you look—if you can stand it—at Fox News every night, most of them are pretty strong-back to able-bodied young people, and their families are middle-aged. But it's an unskilled, low-skilled work force looking for a job and a better economic opportunity. But the policy is equivalent to trying to drive a dump truck through a pinhole.
In other words, there are millions of people at the border trying to come in. There are only 4,000 slots for unskilled workers, so all of them are at the border, being forced to pretend that they're asylees, that they're refugees. And the only way you can become a refugee is to cross the border, break the law, get arrested, and then be put into the queue that takes months and months, in fact, years of determination in a totally clogged up court system in order to get certified that you're an asylum seeker. And you have to prove, for instance, that if you come from Costa Rica, you're in endangerment of life and limb if you stay.
I bring up Costa Rica because I checked the other day, it turns out you can get a ticket from Costa Rica to Kansas City if there were some job openings there for $214 a day. So if we had a guest worker program of that kind that makes so much sense today that would allow people to go to the U.S. consulate in Costa Rica, get a guest worker permit, and be matched up with someone looking to hire people for lawn care work or warehouse work in Kansas City, they could get there for $214. No fuss, no muss. No chaos at the border. No border patrol people chasing around in the middle of the night. And we would open up that little pinhole to the economic rationality that we need to have.
In other words, [the system can be reformed simply] to make it economics-based rather than asylum-based, which is politics. If you have a guest worker program and people come here and they're making the payroll and their employer is certified month after month, year after year, after 10 years, I'd say give them citizenship and let them stay. The whole problem would be solved.
The hordes at the border are millions of people who want to be economic immigrants but are being forced to be political refugees, and they're creating a mess. And the reason I mentioned the $214 Delta ticket is that to get from Costa Rica to the Rio Grande, you have to pay the coyote $4,000 to $10,000 to get you there, when Delta would be happy to do it for $214, if we were only smart enough to have a rational, economics-based immigration system. But there you go again. Immigration control, the whole byzantine, convoluted control system is statism at its worst. It's run by the lobbyists in Washington. Google gets everybody they want. They get all the Ph.D.s, they get all the smart young techies coming out of South Korea or Taiwan or wherever else they're coming from. They take care of their needs. The Fortune 500 takes care of their needs because there are four or five categories for advanced degrees, Ph.D.s, unusual skills. They all get in 3,000 or 4,000 a year. But employers that need to have people working in fast-food joints or in lawn care businesses or in warehouses or in agriculture can't get anybody here legally. So you get the whole mess that we have today.
Gillespie: So, Trump is awful. I can't speak for this audience. I know for myself, I didn't vote for Trump. I don't expect to vote for Trump. I'm not moving to Canada and I'm not moving to Cuba if he wins or anything like that. But isn't the alternative as bad or worse? Because it's going to be Joe Biden.
Stockman: Well, if you have to suffer through another Democratic administration, might as well have a senile guy in the chair, because very little is going to get done. But that's a little facetious. I think from our point of view in the world that four years is not the end of history, and that if we don't get a nonstatist or an anti-statist party, reassemble, realign out of the mess of the uni-party that we have today, well then there really is no hope because you continue to do the same old thing over and over again, which [Albert] Einstein said is the perfect definition of insanity. So I say, what we need to do in 2024 is blow up the Republican Party. It needs to be purged. It is a gang of cultural right-wingers, neocon warmongers, and basically career politicians who use the party as a fundraiser.
Gillespie: Do you still consider yourself a Republican?
Stockman: Well, I think, no. This party needs to go.
Gillespie: In the book, you mentioned the drug war is stupid. Can you give us some explanation in 10 seconds?
Stockman: I'll give you three seconds. The drug war is really goddamn stupid. And again, this is part of the whole Trump shtick. He came down the escalator in 2015 talking about the murders and the rapists and the drug dealers coming across the border. As I lay out in my book quite clearly, if the drug part of it is a problem, deregulate drugs and let the teamsters ship the stuff in and let Philip Morris distribute. Keep it legal.
Bring it above ground. Make it legal. Take out all the premium profit that basically goes to funding the criminal organizations that are necessitated when the government decrees that a desired product shall be artificially scarce. So, that's part of all the rhetoric too. I mean, everything you hear about all the drugs coming across, that is a different issue. And we need to separate them out, the economics of immigration vs. the economics of the stupid war on drugs and the drug control laws that we have. People don't probably remember this—I don't think any of us could, we haven't been around long enough—but until 1918, you didn't have to have a passport to come to America, OK? There were no passports.
All of this immigration control really began then, and it's created its own bureaucracy and its own set of politics. So if we got back to sort of economically driven border policy, which was what we had to our great benefit until 1923 when they passed the first Immigration Act, most of this problem would go away.
This interview has been condensed and edited for style and clarity.
The post David Stockman on Why Trump Can't Fix the Debt: 'This Guy Is Part of the Swamp' appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>In this week's The Reason Roundtable, editors Matt Welch, Katherine Mangu-Ward, Nick Gillespie, and Peter Suderman weigh in on the unfolding situation along the U.S.-Mexico border and reckon with the recent deaths of three U.S. soldiers in Jordan.
01:14—Border crossing disputes at U.S.-Mexico border
19:49—U.S. soldiers killed in Jordan
29:12—Weekly Listener Question
37:39—White House halts natural gas export terminals
44:22—New Hampshire primary post-game
47:22—This week's cultural recommendations
Mentioned in this podcast:
"The Twisted Logic of Greg Abbott's Border Policy," by Fiona Harrigan
"Death in Jordan," by Robby Soave
"Texas Gov. Greg Abbott Doubles Down on Dangerous Claim That Immigration Is 'Invasion,'" by Ilya Somin
"Massive Migrant Reduction," by Liz Wolfe
"The War on Terror Zombie Army Has Assembled," by Matthew Petti
"The Killing of 3 American Troops Was an Avoidable Tragedy," by Matthew Petti
"Does Biden Need Congressional Authorization for His Strikes Against the Houthis?" by Ilya Somin
"What Javier Milei Could Teach Democrats and Republicans About Capitalism," by Veronique de Rugy
"Free Markets Are the Best and Fastest Way to Cut Greenhouse Gas Emissions," by Ronald Bailey
"Capitalism Makes You Cleaner," by Matt Welch
"Independents Hate the Trump-Biden Rematch," by Matt Welch
"Goodbye to Haley the Hawk," by Liz Wolfe
"New Hampshire Takes Us Closer to a Trump-Biden Rematch," by Christian Britschgi
Send your questions to roundtable@reason.com. Be sure to include your social media handle and the correct pronunciation of your name.
Today's sponsors:
Audio production by Ian Keyser; assistant production by Hunt Beaty.
Music: "Angeline," by The Brothers Steve
The post Politics Created the Border Crisis appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>While some of us went a little nuts during the COVID-19 lockdowns, others—including many of our country's leaders and people in the media—went absolutely batshit crazy, often with disastrous results.
Exactly why that happened is the subject of author Jon Ronson's latest season of Things Fell Apart, a podcast that explores the deep origins of today's culture wars in controversies, panics, and delusions from decades ago.
I talked with Ronson about why he believes the creation of a fake medical condition called "excited delirium" in 1988 ultimately led to the death of George Floyd in 2020, how law enforcement fixations on white supremacy warped the investigation into a plot to kidnap Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer, and how the director of the massively influential Plandemic documentaries was actually rewriting the script of Star Wars.
Ronson is best known as the author of The Men Who Stare at Goats, an account of a U.S. Army unit that tried to perfect paranormal powers like walking through walls, and So You've Been Publicly Shamed, which helped define cancel culture just as it was becoming widespread via social media.
We also talk about Things Fell Apart, how he survived COVID, and how critical thinking and media literacy are more important than ever in a world in which we can all produce and consume our versions of the truth.
Today's sponsor:
The post Jon Ronson: Why We Went So Crazy During COVID Lockdowns appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>If we all went a little nuts during the COVID-19 lockdowns, it's absolutely true that some of us—including many of our country's leaders and people in the media—went absolutely batshit crazy, often with disastrous results.
Exactly why that happened is the subject of author Jon Ronson's latest season of Things Fell Apart, a podcast that explores the deep origins of today's culture wars in controversies, panics, and delusions from decades ago.
Reason's Nick Gillespie talked with Ronson about why he believes the creation of a fake medical condition called "excited delirium" in 1988 ultimately led to the death of George Floyd in 2020, how law enforcement fixations on white supremacy warped the investigation into a plot to kidnap Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer, and how the director of the massively influential Plandemic documentaries was actually rewriting the script of Star Wars.
Ronson is best known as the author of The Men Who Stare at Goats, an account of a U.S. Army unit that tried to perfect paranormal powers like walking through walls, and So You've Been Publicly Shamed, which helped define cancel culture just as it was becoming widespread via social media.
The post Why We Went Crazy During COVID Lockdowns appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>In this week's The Reason Roundtable, editors Matt Welch, Katherine Mangu-Ward, Nick Gillespie, and Peter Suderman hold a postmortem examination of Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis' suspended campaign for president before considering Donald Trump's recent claim that presidents deserve full immunity from prosecution.
00:27—Ron DeSantis drops out of the race for the Republican presidential nomination
19:54—Trump claims full presidential immunity
30:05—Weekly Listener Question
47:00—Argentine President Javier Milei addresses Davos
54:38—This week's cultural recommendations
Mentioned in this podcast:
"Ron DeSantis Could Have Run on a Message of Freedom," by Eric Boehm
"So Long to the Man in Lifts," by Liz Wolfe
"4 Reasons Why Dean Phillips Could Shock Write-in Joe Biden in New Hampshire Tuesday," by Matt Welch
"No Labels Has 13 Presidential Candidates, 14 State Ballots, and 7 Weeks To Decide Whether To Run," by Matt Welch
"Is DeSantis a Principled Governor or a Retaliatory Culture Warrior?" by Matt Welch, Katherine Mangu-Ward, Peter Suderman, and Nick Gillespie
"How Should Libertarians Think About Ron DeSantis?" by Nick Gillespie and Zach Weissmueller
"Trump's Demand for 'Total' Presidential Immunity Reflects His Authoritarian Impulses," by Jacob Sullum
"Meet the New Boss: Donald Trump, Who Wants To Tell You What You Can Buy and Sell," by Nick Gillespie
"Should Libertarians Vote For Trump? Nick Gillespie vs. Walter Block," a Soho Forum debate by Gene Epstein
"Donald Trump on Libertarianism: 'I like it. A lot of good things.'" by Nick Gillespie
"Javier Milei Tells World Leaders: 'The State Is Not the Solution,'" by Katarina Hall
"Is Javier Milei a 'Doctrinaire Hayekian' and a Secret Reason Science Project?" by Nick Gillespie
"Conservative Liberals for Mainstream Anti-MSMism," by Matt Welch
"Talking about Punk as a 'Cultural Antibiotic' for the Body Politic!" by Nick Gillespie
"School Choice Is Popular and Increasingly Common," by J.D. Tuccille
Reason's archive on National School Choice Week
Send your questions to roundtable@reason.com. Be sure to include your social media handle and the correct pronunciation of your name.
Today's sponsors:
Audio production by Ian Keyser; assistant production by Hunt Beaty.
Music: "Angeline," by The Brothers Steve
The post DeSantis Down and Out appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>"I'm under no illusion that humanity will completely eradicate the racial tribal instinct or racism or bigotry itself. But I feel that colorblindness is the North Star that we should use when making decisions," argues Coleman Hughes, a writer and podcaster who specializes in race, ethics, and public policy.
Hughes' forthcoming book, The End of Race Politics: Arguments for a Colorblind America, calls for returning to the original ideals of the American civil rights movement, arguing that "our departure from the colorblind ideal has ushered in a new era of fear, paranoia, and resentment." After some staffers and audience members declared his recent TED talk "hurtful," for example, Hughes believes TED deliberately downplayed the online version of the presentation. "TED," Hughes concluded, "like many organizations, is caught between a faction that believes in free speech and viewpoint diversity and a faction that believes if you hurt my feelings with even center-left, center-right, or, God forbid, right-wing views, you need to be censored."
In November, Reason's Nick Gillespie spoke with Hughes about colorblindness, free expression, and whether class or race is the more accurate indicator of being disadvantaged in the U.S. today.
Reason: What is the case for colorblindness?
Hughes: We are human beings. Despite the philosophies of people like Michel Foucault and others who I know you have some admiration for, there is such a thing as human nature. One of its uglier elements is tribalism: the tendency to form tribes based around ethnicity or race—or any variable, really—to devalue the lives of others to compete. And this has played out in everything from genocide at the worst end to just everyday social mistrust at the low end.
America—unlike most places, which have defined the concept of a nation around an ethnicity—has tried to do something different. You can come to this country and be any race, color, or creed, and define yourself as an American. This is a fragile experiment. It's not an easy experiment. It's something without precedent. And one of the challenges is that we all have to figure out how to live with each other and trade with each other and befriend each other and so forth without succumbing to our worst tribal instincts. Some of it is inevitable. But the question is: How should the state minimize this?
Now, the answer that arose during the civil rights movement, from people like Martin Luther King, Bayard Rustin, and going back to A. Philip Randolph, was essentially that the state should not make any laws that take race into account one way or the other. You should not try to discriminate against people really for any reason. You should not try to discriminate to repay people for past discrimination. There should be something which David Bernstein called the separation of race and state. In the long run, this is the best way to govern this fragile experiment.
People now reject the idea that colorblindness is even possible. Can you explain why you disagree with that?
First, I would concede that most of our ideals are unattainable. If I were to sit here and say, "I want a peaceful society," no one would mistake that for the belief that we will actually get to a society with zero murders per year. It's never happened. Right? We take that as a kind of North Star that guides us when we are choosing between A and B, whether in life or in public policy.
I view colorblindness the same way. I'm under no illusion that humanity will completely eradicate the racial tribal instinct or racism or bigotry itself. But I feel that colorblindness, it's the North Star that we should use when making decisions about public policy, interpersonal, and so forth.
In the '60s, there was a consensus for a short period of time that colorblindness was the way to go. Shortly after that, the country experienced massive rioting, the likes of which was basically not seen again until Rodney King and then 2020. In the '70s, something started brewing in the academy called critical race theory, the brainchild of Derrick Bell and Kimberlé Crenshaw, which basically agreed with the white supremacists on the fundamental idea that race is always going to be everything: These naive people that think we can aspire to something higher than being obsessed with race are exactly that—they're naive. The only thing you should do in life is hunker down into the tribe in which you were born and try to get as much power as possible.
What do class-based programs look like? And how do they compare to race-based programs?
I overuse the word class. It's not really precise. Socioeconomics in general—how much money you make, income, and wealth—is a much closer proxy for disadvantage than racial identity. In other words, if you pick 10 people from the country at random, from Kansas, from New York, from wherever, and you wanted to rank them by privilege, it's wiser to use their socioeconomics than to assume that the black people are at one end and the white people are on the other. By using socioeconomics, you're getting closer, imperfect as well, but much closer to what we mean when we say someone is disadvantaged.
What are the types of programs that you envision that would be helpful to make society better?
As a philosopher, I have the luxury of painting the abstract picture without filling in all the details. But look, there are already social programs that are far more widely subscribed and popular, like the earned income tax credit and need-based financial aid in colleges. I'm not going to argue that they're perfect, but they're based on a scheme that is generally more correctly identifying the people that have less advantage than the regime of race-based policies that has become normalized over the past 50 years.
How do you view the role of government?
It's a good question. Truthfully, I found every theory of government to be insufficient, so I'm not a subscriber of any particular theory. I liked Tyler Cowen's idea of state capacity libertarianism quite a bit, which was basically the idea that markets are fantastic—they are the source of the world's wealth—but a lot of our problems today necessitate having a very functional state that's capable of occasionally doing big things and doing them efficiently.
You were asked to give a talk at TED about colorblindness. What happened?
So I don't know if you've heard of the Streisand effect, but basically, Chris Anderson invited me to come give a talk along the lines of what I've just been talking to you about. I gave the talk, and immediately onstage I saw a few people that were visibly upset in the room. But largely, the crowd thought it was within the bounds of acceptable conversation.
The next day I start getting some messages saying there's a group called Black@TED, which is upset by my talk. Hurt, I think, is the word that was used. And I offered to talk to them and they didn't want to. So on and so forth.
In a nutshell, what happened is that rather than release my TED talk normally, they asked me to agree to a series of kind of strange release strategies where they would tag a rebuttal to the end of my talk in the same video, or a debate that I participated in with someone else would be combined into the video, all of which I thought was unfair, since there were no factual errors. So eventually we agreed that they would release my thing normally and then two weeks later I do a debate with somebody. So I did the debate with Jamelle Bouie of The New York Times.
But Tim Urban tweeted that he's pretty sure TED was intentionally sandbagging, not promoting, and not amplifying my video, because every other TEDx talk had a minimum 400,000 views, maximum 800,000, and mine strangely had 70,000. The only outlier in the whole batch.
Details aside, the crucial thing is that TED, like many organizations, is caught between a faction that believes in free speech and viewpoint diversity and a faction that believes if you hurt my feelings with even center-left, center-right, or, God forbid, right-wing views, you need to be censored. The same kinds of people who say that speech is violence, who say that they were actually hurt or felt unsafe because of my TED talk, are the same kinds of people right now that see Hamas slaughtering children in front of their mothers and say, "That's not violence. That's resistance."
It's really a situation of a heckler's veto. There's a tiny minority of people that do not believe such views should be heard. They have outsize power. And when people aren't willing to stand up to it, it can make it seem like they're everyone.
Did you experience that as a student at Columbia University as well?
Probably my second year, 2017, I had a conversation with someone and we kind of realized there was this moment in college where you sort of come out of the closet with a friend as not "woke." And you just put yourself out there and you hope to God that they're also not woke and they're usually not. That's the thing. Most of the time, the vast majority of kids on these college campuses are not hook, line, and sinker woke in the sense that they believe speech is violence. But there is a radical fringe—5 percent, maybe 10 percent—that is very loud and very confident.
What draws you to Martin Luther King Jr.?
He's a rare figure for a few reasons. One is the depth and breadth of his knowledge. He has a great essay called "My Pilgrimage to Nonviolence," where he explains in detail what it is that he learned from Plato, what it is that he learned from [Immanuel] Kant, from [Karl] Marx, why he rejected Marxism, how he integrated all of the Western European canon into his line of thought, and then also brought with it the Baptist preacher element, integrated all of it in a way that was rigorous and inspiring to blacks and whites alike.
I'm a secular person. I'm an atheist. I can't bring myself to believe in any of the man-made books. But I believe that secular people want to sanitize the Christian element of Martin Luther King, because to admit that his Christianity was a core part of his success would cast doubt on the hope that secularism can stand on its own two feet.
What do I mean by that? I mean when Martin Luther King got up there and said in Christ "there is neither Greek nor Jew, black nor white, bond nor free," that made sense and gave goose bumps to the black public, to the white public, etc. He was speaking a language that people understood not just in their prefrontal cortex but in their hearts. There's no secular equivalent to that statement that really resonates with people to such an extent. And that's a problem for someone like me who is trying to update in many ways MLK, which is that I'm not a Christian; I can't speak that language honestly. And even if I could, the country isn't Christian enough to resonate with it.
Who was Bayard Rustin and why does he matter so much?
Bayard Rustin is one of my great intellectual heroes, probably more so than King even. He was born in Pennsylvania, raised by his grandparents, who he thought were his parents for most of his life. He was a Communist very briefly, and then a socialist and civil rights organizer in the 1940s.
Rosa Parks is remembered for refusing to give up her seat in the front of the bus and go to the back. Many people had done this before Rosa Parks. She was not the first to do this. Bayard Rustin did this 13 years before she did and got beaten to a pulp by the cops because of it. Rosa Parks was just the one lucky enough to make the history books. The country was ready, in other words. So he was right there from the beginning.
He ends up getting involved with Martin Luther King Jr. and helping him start his organization, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. He organized and led the March on Washington, at which Martin Luther King gave his famous "I Have a Dream" speech. He read the list of demands at that event, and he was just a beautiful essayist throughout the entire period that very few people know about.
An important fact about why he isn't known more is that he was openly gay. He was arrested for being caught in a car with a man. And in fact, Dr. King was blackmailed by Adam Clayton Powell who threatened to expose a fictional gay affair between Rustin and King if they didn't cancel a planned protest at the [Democratic National Convention].
What I really admire about him is that he was more active and more passionate than anyone you could name in American history about getting black people full human rights. But he was also completely clear about the fact that race is not what's important. And when the Black Power movement came along in the late '60s and started saying that "actually we don't want equality, we want more, we believe black people are not just equal to white people, but better," he was very clear-eyed in saying that this is evil. That this is not just something for radical chic white liberals to pay lip service to; this is an evil on the horizon if we allow it to fester. And he drew that line very clearly in a way that too few people have courage to do.
This interview has been condensed and edited for style and clarity.
The post Coleman Hughes on the Separation of Race and State appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>"If the problem with campus speech codes is the selectivity with which universities penalize various forms of bigotry," wrote James Kirchick recently in The New York Times, "the solution is not to expand the university's power to punish expression. It's to abolish speech codes entirely."
Kirchick was writing about widespread outrage at the deeply nuanced and deeply hypocritical defense of speech offered by the presidents of Harvard, MIT, and the University of Pennsylvania at a congressional hearing about antisemitic and anti-Zionist campus reactions to the October 7, 2023, Hamas attacks on Israel.
Although Kirchick, the author of Secret City: The Hidden History of Gay Washington and The End of Europe: Dictators, Demagogues, and the Coming Dark Age, is an ardent defender of Israel, he is also a self-described free-speech absolutist who is disgusted by calls to restrict expression, whether on or off-campus. He says that instead of clamping down on speech, we should be arguing more openly and publicly, even when it's deeply uncomfortable, as it was when he raised novelist Alice Walker's antisemitic views during a literary conference at which they were both speaking.
We talk about how identity politics has overwhelmed the left's traditional defense of free speech, why so many younger journalists seem lukewarm at best to the First Amendment, and how to muster the courage to speak up for first principles in uncomfortable and hostile situations.
Previous appearances on The Reason Interview:
How Homophobia Warped the Cold War, June 1, 2022
The Very Idea of Europe Is Finished, April 23, 2017
The post James Kirchick: 'Abolish Speech Codes Entirely' appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>"If the problem with campus speech codes is the selectivity with which universities penalize various forms of bigotry," wrote James Kirchick recently in The New York Times, "the solution is not to expand the university's power to punish expression. It's to abolish speech codes entirely."
Kirchick was writing about widespread outrage at the nuanced and hypocritical defense of speech offered by the presidents of Harvard, MIT, and the University of Pennsylvania at a congressional hearing about antisemitic and anti-Zionist campus reactions to the October 7, 2023 Hamas attacks on Israel.
Although Kirchick, the author of Secret City: The Hidden History of Gay Washington and The End of Europe: Dictators, Demagogues, and the Coming Dark Age, is an ardent defender of Israel, he is also a self-described free-speech absolutist who is disgusted by calls to restrict expression, whether on or off-campus.
Reason's Nick Gillespie spoke to Kirchick about how identity politics has overwhelmed the left's traditional defense of free speech, why so many younger journalists seem lukewarm at best to the First Amendment, and how to muster the courage to speak up for first principles in uncomfortable and hostile situations.
Articles mentioned:
"What Happens Where Free Speech Is Unprotected," by James Kirchick
"Calling Out An Antisemite," by James Kirchick
The post Free Speech Absolutism in Practice appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>In this week's The Reason Roundtable, editors Matt Welch, Katherine Mangu-Ward, Nick Gillespie, and Peter Suderman stare down the results of last night's Iowa caucuses, which saw former President Donald Trump notch a resounding win in his bid to return to the White House.
01:45—Iowa caucuses results and recap
33:52—Weekly Listener Question
41:02—The U.S. attacks on Houthis in Yemen
47:13—The latest on the bipartisan spending deal drama in Congress
49:58—This week's cultural recommendations
Mentioned in this podcast:
"Trump Romps Through Iowa Caucuses, Calls for GOP to 'Come Together,'" by Eric Boehm
"The Comeback Kid," by Liz Wolfe
"Vivek Ramaswamy Leaves the Field," by Jesse Walker
"Chris Christie Tried To Break Trump's Hold on the GOP. It Didn't Work." by Eric Boehm
"Most Iowans Don't Care About the Caucuses. You Shouldn't Either." by Adam Sullivan
"The Case Against Trump: Donald Trump Is an Enemy of Freedom," by Matt Welch
"Joe Biden's $11 Trillion Plan To Bankrupt America," by Nick Gillespie
"U.S. Attacks Houthis in Yemen," by Liz Wolfe
"The War on Terror Zombie Army Has Assembled," by Matthew Petti
"Storks Don't Take Orders From the State," by Elizabeth Nolan Brown
"Are Car Seat Laws Driving Down America's Birthrate?" by Christian Britschgi
"Does Biden Need Congressional Authorization for His Strikes Against the Houthis?" by Ilya Somin
"MLK's Contested Yet Universal Blueprint for Freedom," by Matt Welch
"The Beekeeper Is a Pulpy, Enjoyable Action Movie About a Rigged System," by Peter Suderman
"11 Trillion Reasons To Fear Joe Biden's Presidency" by Nick Gillespie
"RFK Jr.: The Reason Interview," by Nick Gillespie and Zach Weissmueller
"Jeb Bush: What He Thinks of Trump, Biden, DeSantis, and 'Florida Man,'" by Nick Gillespie
"Vivek Ramaswamy: Why He's Running for President—and Against 'Woke Capitalism,'" by Nick Gillespie and Zach Weissmueller
"Baby Bust!" by Kerry Howley
"Can Governments Increase Birthrates? Should They?" by Nick Gillespie
"Child-proofing the World," by Nick Gillespie
"'American Fiction': The Great Awokening," by Kurt Loder
"Sharks Stuffed With Money," by Nick Gillespie
The Reason Speakeasy with David Stockman, January 22, 2024
Send your questions to roundtable@reason.com. Be sure to include your social media handle and the correct pronunciation of your name.
Today's sponsors:
Audio production by Ian Keyser; assistant production by Hunt Beaty.
Music: "Angeline," by The Brothers Steve
The post The Trump Train Rolls Through Iowa appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>Last Friday, January 5, the National Park Service (NPS) announced plans to permanently remove a statue of Pennsylvania founder William Penn and a replica of his home from Philadelphia's Welcome Park and replace them with "an expanded interpretation of the Native American history" in the region. NPS solicited public input on the park's "rehabilitation," but wasn't prepared for the response.
We need your input on Welcome Park rehabilitation! More info at: https://t.co/owkb3jxBIV pic.twitter.com/nh092m4S5W
— IndependenceNPS ???????? (@INDEPENDENCENHP) January 5, 2024
Just 72 hours later, NPS reversed course due to voluminous outrage voiced primarily on X, the social media site formerly known as Twitter. Among the many critics of the statue's removal was Pennsylvania's Democratic Gov. Josh Shapiro, who announced his "team has been in contact with the Biden Administration throughout the day to correct this decision. I'm pleased Welcome Park will remain the rightful home of this William Penn statue—right here in the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania Penn founded."
The speed with which NPS folded is remarkable, and one that harkens back to earlier moments when the internet was young and many of us (certainly me!) celebrated the awesome leveling power of what was then still called "new" media. Years before X/Twitter played a major role in relatively trivial controversies du jour such as Bill Cosby's failed comeback and Justin Trudeau's inane eulogy for Fidel Castro, the micro-blogging site was credited with launching "revolutions" in Moldova, Iran, Egypt, Tunisia, and elsewhere. As The Philadelphia Inquirer's wrote, "The [NPS] plan ended the same way it started: through a set of tweets."
I'm a fan of figurative and sometimes literal iconoclasm, so I've got no problem with tearing down statues for all sorts of reasons, including simply because tastes have changed. But pulling down William Penn was a particularly ill-conceived move. Almost alone among colonial founders, he treated Native Americans with precisely the sort of respect, grace, and love that should be celebrated rather than tossed into the dustbin of history. The treaty that he signed with local tribes in the 1680s helped secure peace until the 1750s, when the French and Indian War destabilized the region.
Penn was far from perfect (like other early Quakers, he owned slaves), but we should remember and celebrate radical, proto-liberal figures such as him and Roger Williams, the founder of Providence and the colony of Rhode Island and who also engaged local tribes with respect and dignity. We would have been a better country had we followed their leads more closely. And we will have a poorer future if we remove their presence—already faded, if not forgotten virtually completely—from our public places (Williams, alas, is the namesake of one of the lowest-ranked law schools in the country, a particularly ignoble fate for the former secretary to the great English jurist Edward Coke).
The past is filled with crimes, wars, and disasters that still mark us and bleed through into the present, staining the social fabric. But it is equally stuffed with examples of what we could have and should have done differently. In 1918, the literary critic Van Wyck Brooks issued a call to create a "usable past" that would help us both understand where we came from and where we might be headed. "The present is a void and [Americans float]… in that void because the past that survives in the common mind of the present is a past without living value," he wrote. "The past is an inexhaustible storehouse of apt attitudes and adaptable ideals; it opens of itself at the touch of desire; it yields up, now this treasure, now that, to anyone who comes to it armed with a capacity for personal choices."
The problem with the NPS's plan wasn't that it was trying to revise the past—we do that all the time, sometimes consciously and sometimes not—but in the specific decision to toss William Penn out on his ear. There is so much to learn from his beliefs, actions, and life—a radical pacifist who was also a champion of religious liberty at a time when that was dangerous, and a champion of honest and open commercial exchange—we would beggar ourselves by erasing him. There is surely enough space in Welcome Park and public discourse for Penn and Native Americans.
Thanks be to X on this score. At a time when social media is being attacked for causing or contributing to all the ills of the world, this controversy reminds us that technologies that disperse and decentralize communications can help create a more usable past by giving voice to present-day concerns.
The post William Penn Statue Reversal Shows Positive Power of Social Media appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>Did you know that by 2050, a quarter of the planet's population will reside in Africa? Yet despite abundant natural resources and a young and ambitious population, the continent remains the poorest of them all.
Born in Senegal and now residing in Austin, Texas, Magatte Wade is director of the Center for African Prosperity at the Atlas Network, a nonprofit that supports think tanks and activist groups in the developing world. A serial entrepreneur, she's currently the CEO (and founder) of SkinIsSkin, which sells a series of skin and lip products sourced in Africa.
Wade is also the author of the new memoir and manifesto, The Heart of a Cheetah: How We Have Been Lied To about African Poverty, and What That Means for Human Flourishing. She claims the solution to Africa's problems lies with what her mentor, the late economist George Ayittey, called "the cheetah generation," young Africans who embrace free markets, individualism, human rights, and transparency in government.
Reason's Nick Gillespie sat down with Wade to discuss her book, "conscious capitalism," charter cities, and how cryptocurrencies are helping people like her build the Africa—and the world—they want.
The post Magatte Wade: The Real Reasons Why Africa Is Poor and Why It Matters appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>Did you know that by 2050, fully a quarter of the planet's population will reside in Africa? Yet despite abundant natural resources and a young and ambitious population, the continent remains the poorest of them all.
Born in Senegal and now residing in Austin, Texas, Magatte Wade is director of the Center for African Prosperity at the Atlas Network, a nonprofit that supports think tanks and activist groups in the developing world. A serial entrepreneur, she's currently the CEO (and founder) of SkinIsSkin, which sells a series of skin and lip products sourced in Africa.
Wade is also the author of the new memoir and manifesto, The Heart of a Cheetah: How We Have Been Lied To about African Poverty—and What That Means for Human Flourishing. The solution to Africa's problems lie with what her mentor, the late economist George Ayittey, called "the cheetah generation," young Africans who embrace free markets, individualism, human rights, and transparency in government.
Reason's Nick Gillespie sat down with Wade to discuss her book, "conscious capitalism," charter cities, and how cryptocurrencies are helping people like her build the Africa—and the world—they want.
The post The Real Reasons Africa Is Poor—and Why It Matters appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>In this week's episode of The Reason Roundtable, editors Peter Suderman and Katherine Mangu-Ward welcome back Nick Gillespie, alongside special guest Christian Britschgi. The editors check in on Nikki Haley's slight surge in the Republican primary race and then assess the Democratic Party's growing fears about the state of Joe Biden's reelection campaign.
00:32—Nikki Haley's campaign situation
25:23—Democratic concerns about the Biden campaign
38:19—Weekly Listener Question
40:44—Harvard President Claudine Gay resigns.
47:05—This week's cultural recommendations
Mentioned in this podcast:
"No, Nikki Haley, We Don't Need to Turn Schools Into Airports, the Place Literally Everyone Hates," by C.J. Ciaramella
"Haley Rising," by Liz Wolfe
"Nikki Haley Opposed Boeing Subsidies at Tonight's GOP Debate. As Governor, She Gave Boeing Millions." by Christian Britschgi
"Nikki Haley's Crazy Plan To Require Verification on Social Media," by Robby Soave
"2024 GOP Candidates Are Competing To Restrict Immigration," by Fiona Harrigan
"Republicans Pivot to Bombing Iran in Third Debate," by Eric Boehm
"My Favorite Things (TSA Version)," by Remy, Austin Bragg, Meredith Bragg, and John Carter
"Southern Nationalism," by Charles Oliver
"Blame Joe Biden and the Fed for Inflation," by Nick Gillespie and Vernon Smith
"Joe Biden's $11 Trillion Plan To Bankrupt America," by Nick Gillespie
"Real Man of Genius: Joe Biden," by Nick Gillespie and Dan Hayes
"Blessed Are the Shitposters," by Liz Wolfe
"Does A.P. Really Think Conservatives Invented Plagiarism Accusations?" by Robby Soave
"Harvard's Affirmative Action Hire Gets the Boot," by Liz Wolfe
"Harvard President Claudine Gay Resigns After Plagiarism Scandal," by Robby Soave
"Hell Hath No Fury," by Liz Wolfe
"Andy Warhol—From A to B and Back Again," by Nick Gillespie
"Artifact: Andy Warhol's Ironic Achievement," by Nick Gillespie
"Supreme Court: Andy Warhol's Prince Prints Not 'Transformative' Enough for Fair Use," by Joe Lancaster
Send your questions to roundtable@reason.com. Be sure to include your social media handle and the correct pronunciation of your name.
Today's sponsor:
Around New Year's, we get obsessed with how to change ourselves instead of just expanding on what we're already doing right. Maybe you finally organized one part of your space, and you want to tackle another. Or maybe you're taking your supplements every morning, and now you want to actually eat breakfast too. Therapy helps you find your strengths, so you can ditch the extreme resolutions and make changes that really stick. If you're thinking of starting therapy, give BetterHelp a try. It's entirely online. Designed to be convenient, flexible, and suited to your schedule. Just fill out a brief questionnaire to get matched with a licensed therapist, and switch therapists any time for no additional charge. Celebrate the progress you've already made. Visit BetterHelp.com/roundtable today to get 10 percent off your first month.
Audio production by Ian Keyser; assistant production by Hunt Beaty.
Music: "Angeline," by The Brothers Steve
The post Nikki Haley's Last Stand? appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>William D. Eggers is co-author, with Donald F. Kettl, of Bridgebuilders: How Government Can Transcend Boundaries To Solve Big Problems. He's now the executive director of Deloitte's Center for Government Insights, but 30 years ago, he was the director of government reform for Reason Foundation, the nonprofit that publishes Reason and this podcast. In fact, I interviewed with him when I applied for my first job here.
Eggers has since worked with dozens of governments at all levels, both in the United States and internationally, and he's written a shelf's worth of books on the proper scope and function of government. I talked with him about Bridgebuilders, what he's learned over the past three decades about making government more effective and less intrusive, and why it's long past time to move beyond what he and his co-author call "the vending machine model" of government.
The post William D. Eggers: Making Government More Effective and Less Intrusive appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>William D. Eggers is co-author, with Donald F. Kettl, of Bridgebuilders: How Government Can Transcend Boundaries to Solve Big Problems. He's now the executive director of Deloitte's Center for Government Insights, but 30 years ago, he ran the privatization center for Reason Foundation, the nonprofit that publishes Reason.
Eggers has since worked with dozens of governments at all levels, both in the United States and internationally, and he's written a shelf's worth of books on the proper scope and function of government. Reason's Nick Gillespie talked with Eggers about Bridgebuilders, what he's learned over the past three decades about making government more effective and less intrusive, and why it's long past time to move beyond what he and his co-author call "the vending machine model" of government.
The post Can the Government Be More Effective? appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>In this calendar year's last episode of The Reason Roundtable, editors Matt Welch, Katherine Mangu-Ward, Nick Gillespie, and Peter Suderman select various under-covered stories from the past year across three categories: politics, science, and culture. So long, 2023!
01:45—Under-covered stories in politics
30:13—Under-covered stories in science
46:00—Under-covered stories in culture
Mentioned in this podcast:
"Introducing REASON," by Lanny Friedlander
"Congress Admits It Has a Debt Problem, but Will It Do Anything?" by J.D. Tuccille
"After Moody's Warning, Federal Officials Continue To Ignore Fiscal Reality," by Eric Boehm
"The Real Scandal in Washington Is the Government's Reckless Spending," by Veronique de Rugy
"Medicare's Fiscal Ruin," by Peter Suderman
"'Bidenomics' Is Failing Everyday Americans," by Veronique de Rugy
"We Are Out of Money," by Matt Welch
"The Myth of the Broke Millennial," by Jean Twenge
"3 Myths About American Decline," by Nick Gillespie
"Capitalism Made Us All Richer. So Why Are We Unhappy?" by Nick Gillespie
"It's Time to Discard Piketty's Inequality Statistics," by Phil W. Magness and Vincent J. Geloso
"George Will: Brace Yourself for Donald Trump & the Authoritarian Moment," by Todd Krainin, Nick Gillespie, and Matt Welch
"The Equity Mess," by Matt Welch
"The Future Is Florida," by Katherine Mangu-Ward
"The DeSantis-Newsom Debate Was Really a Debate About COVID," by Eric Boehm
The Best of Reason Magazine podcast
"Will AI Destroy Humanity?" by Gene Epstein
"Biden Issues 'A.I. Red Tape Wishlist,'" by Ronald Bailey
"Despite the Doomsday Narrative, Global Inequality Has Significantly Declined," by Veronique de Rugy
"U.S. Life Expectancy Increases for the First Time in 4 Years," by Ronald Bailey
"The Great COVID Rupture," by Matt Welch
"Old People Are Hot Now," by Sarah Rose Siskind
"Kevin Kelly: Excellent Advice for Living From the World's Leading Optimist," by Nick Gillespie
"Hollywood must change—but how?" Q&A with Rob Long by Nick Gillespie and Zach Weissmueller
"Is the world going to hell?" Q&A with Stefan Sagmeister by Nick Gillespie
Now Is Better, by Stefan Sagmeister
"'I didn't realize people still think socialism is a good idea.'" Q&A with Agnieszka Pilat by Nick Gillespie
"Living our best fake lives online," Q&A with Dave Cicirelli by Nick Gillespie
Send your questions to roundtable@reason.com. Be sure to include your social media handle and the correct pronunciation of your name.
Audio production by Ian Keyser; assistant production by Hunt Beaty.
Music: "Angeline," by The Brothers Steve
The post 2023's Most Under-Covered Stories appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>Was Milton Friedman the most important libertarian of them all? That's part of the conversation I had with today's guest, Stanford historian Jennifer Burns, who has written a masterful and definitive new biography of the Nobel Prize–winning economist. Without reservation, I recommend you check out her new book, Milton Friedman: The Last Conservative.
Friedman was arguably not just the most influential free market economist of the 20th century but the central figure in building the broad political and intellectual coalition that successfully challenged Keynesian economics and the top-down rule of experts in so many aspects of our lives. I talked with Burns about Friedman's conceptual and methodological breakthroughs in economics; his way-ahead-of-his-time collaboration with female economists such as Anna Schwartz and his wife Rose; his role in popularizing free market economics through his columns in Newsweek and the TV series Free To Choose; his controversial engagements with politicians such as Richard Nixon and Augusto Pinochet; and his role in ending the military draft and championing school choice. We also talked about Burns' previous book, Goddess of the Market: Ayn Rand and the American Right, and its connections to her new work.
This episode was taped at the Reason Speakeasy, a monthly, unscripted conversation in New York City with outspoken defenders of free thinking and heterodoxy that doubles as a live taping of this podcast. Go here to get information about Speakeasys and all our upcoming events.
The post Jennifer Burns: Why Milton Friedman Matters More Than Ever appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>"Was Milton Friedman the most important libertarian of them all?" Reason's Nick Gillespie asked Stanford historian Jennifer Burns during a live taping of The Reason Interview With Nick Gillespie podcast in New York City. Burns is the author of the masterful and definitive new biography of the Nobel Prize–winning economist, titled Milton Friedman: The Last Conservative.
Friedman was arguably not just the most influential free market economist of the 20th century but the central figure in building the broad political and intellectual coalition that successfully challenged Keynesian economics and the top-down rule of experts in so many aspects of our lives.
Gillespie and Burns discussed Friedman's conceptual and methodological breakthroughs in economics; his way-ahead-of-his-time collaboration with female economists such as Anna Schwartz and his wife Rose; his role in popularizing free market economics through his columns in Newsweek and the TV series Free To Choose; his controversial engagements with politicians such as Richard Nixon and Augusto Pinochet; and his role in ending the military draft and championing school choice.
This discussion was taped at the Reason Speakeasy, a monthly, unscripted conversation in New York City with outspoken defenders of free thinking and heterodoxy that doubles as a live taping of this podcast.
1:51– Milton Friedman's life, ideas, and influences
18:48– Friedman's ideas and impacts on economics
38:22– How Friedman thought about school vouchers and guaranteed minimum income
46:24– Friedman's ties to the Pinochet regime and his role in Chilean economic reforms
1:19:50– The monetary revolution in Brazil and Friedman's views on the International Monetary Fund
The post Jennifer Burns on Milton Friedman's Legacy appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>In this week's The Reason Roundtable, editors Matt Welch, Katherine Mangu-Ward, Nick Gillespie, and Peter Suderman review supposed items on the agenda for former President Donald Trump's potential second term.
00:26—Donald Trump's second-term agenda
34:56—Weekly Listener Question
44:00—Congress passes FISA Reform and Reauthorization Act of 2023
50:50—This week's cultural recommendations
Mentioned in this podcast:
"The Case Against Trump: Donald Trump Is an Enemy of Freedom," by Matt Welch
"Demonic Dollar Store," by Liz Wolfe
"Why Electing Biden (or Trump) Won't Settle Anything for Long," by Nick Gillespie
"11 Trillion Reasons To Fear Joe Biden's Presidency," by Nick Gillespie
"How Much More Should Trump Be Spending on You?" by Nick Gillespie
"Restricting Asylum Will Cause More Border Chaos," by Fiona Harrigan
"2024 GOP Candidates Are Competing To Restrict Immigration," by Fiona Harrigan
"President Trump Freed Drug Offenders. Candidate Trump Wants To Kill Them." by Jacob Sullum
"Republicans' Dangerous Plans to Turn the War on Drugs into a Real War by Attacking Mexico," by Ilya Somin
"House Proposal Would Expand Federal Warrantless Spying Authority," by Eric Boehm
"Congress Prepares To Reauthorize a Warrantless Domestic Spying Program the FBI Abused," by Eric Boehm
"Congress Hasn't Passed a Budget on Time in 27 Years," by Peter Suderman
"10 Disturbing Things About the FBI Since 9/11. Plus, James Comey." by Nick Gillespie
"Edward Snowden: The Individual Is More Powerful Today Than Ever Before," by Nick Gillespie
FISA Section 702 Civil Rights Abuses, by the Brennan Center for Justice
"One-Shop Stopping: Do Wal-Mart and Home Deport spell the end of 'community?'" by Nick Gillespie
"Don't Throw the Book At Superstores," by Nick Gillespie
"Chain Heat: Are book superstores a threat to the reading public?" by Nick Gillespie
"Why Does Hollywood Hate Real Estate Developers?" by Christian Britschgi
Send your questions to roundtable@reason.com. Be sure to include your social media handle and the correct pronunciation of your name.
Today's sponsors:
Audio production by Ian Keyser; assistant production by Hunt Beaty.
Music: "Angeline," by The Brothers Steve
The post Welcome to the Hyperbole Factory appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>Quitting is massively underrated, says Annie Duke, an author, psychologist, and former professional poker player who holds a bracelet from the 2004 World Series of Poker.
Her latest book is Quit: The Power of Knowing When To Walk Away. Using examples ranging from Muhammad Ali's refusal to retire from boxing earlier in his career to the over-budget, much-delayed California high-speed rail project to catastrophic American wars in Vietnam, Afghanistan, and Iraq, she makes the case that blind commitment to grit and stick-to-it-iveness routinely leads us down the wrong path is our careers, politics, and personal lives.
She talks about misleading mental tics like the sunk-cost fallacy, the cult of identity, and the endowment effect, and how to understand and reverse them in our personal lives, our work, and our politics. She earned her Ph.D. in cognitive psychology from the University of Pennsylvania, getting her degree in 2023 after taking a 30-year break from academia. We talk about how her experience of knowing when to quit in poker—and higher education—informed her high regard for knowing when to head for the exits.
To see a Reason interview about Duke's previous book Thinking in Bets, go here.
Today's sponsor:
The post Annie Duke: Quitting Is Totally Underrated appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>Quitting is massively underrated, says Annie Duke, an author, doctor of psychology, and former professional poker player who holds a bracelet from the 2004 World Series of Poker.
Her latest book is Quit: The Power of Knowing When To Walk Away. Using examples ranging from Muhammad Ali's refusal to retire from boxing earlier in his career to the over-budget, much-delayed California high-speed rail project to catastrophic American wars in Vietnam, Afghanistan, and Iraq, she makes the case that blind commitment to grit and stick-to-it-iveness routinely leads us down the wrong path is our careers, politics, and personal lives.
She talks about misleading mental tics like the sunk-cost fallacy, the cult of identity, and the endowment effect, and how to understand and reverse them in our personal lives, our work, and our politics. She earned her Ph.D. in cognitive psychology from the University of Pennsylvania, getting her degree in 2023 after taking a 30-year break from academia. We talk about how her experience of knowing when to quit in poker—and higher education—informed her high regard for knowing when to head for the exits.
(To see a Reason interview about Duke's previous book Thinking in Bets, go here).
The post Why We Need To Quit More in Politics, Work, and Life appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>In this week's The Reason Roundtable, editors Matt Welch, Katherine Mangu-Ward, Nick Gillespie, and Peter Suderman debate free speech on campus amid the fallout from a tense congressional questioning of elite university presidents last week.
02:35—University presidents face free speech questions during contentious congressional hearing
31:02—Weekly Listener Question
39:50—Another GOP debate
51:13—This week's cultural recommendations
Mentioned in this podcast:
"Don't Excuse the Hypocrisy of University Presidents When It Comes to Free Speech," by Robby Soave
"Congress Shouldn't Encourage College Presidents To Censor Even More Speech," by Robby Soave
"Fight Hate Speech with More Speech, Not Censorship: ACLU's Nadine Strossen," by Nick Gillespie
"The Most Obnoxious Blowhard in America," by Liz Wolfe
"DeSantis Returns To 'Too Online' Roots With Debate Comments About Trans Kids," by Emma Camp
"Chris Christie Is Right, Trump's Trade War Accomplished Nothing," by Eric Boehm
"Vivek Ramasway's Crusade Against 'Woke, Inc.,'" by Zach Weissmueller and Nick Gillespie
"Nikki Haley's Crazy Plan to Require Verification on Social Media," by Robby Soave
"Why Pols from New Jersey Aren't Born to Run," by Nick Gillespie
"Nikki Haley Opposed Boeing Subsidies at Tonight's GOP Debate. As Governor, She Gave Boeing Millions." by Christian Britschgi
"A Private Libertarian City in Honduras," by Zach Weissmueller
"Honduras Ends Its Experiment With Charter Cities," by Brian Doherty
"The Croatian Invasion of the Micronation of Liberland," by Brian Doherty
"Thank You, Reason Donors, for a Huge Webathon Success," by Katherine Mangu-Ward
"San Francisco's Can-Kicking on Zoning Reform Could See It Lose All Zoning Powers," by Christian Britschgi
"Dave Smith: What Is a Libertarian?" by Zach Weissmueller and Liz Wolfe
"Hardcore History's Dan Carlin on Why The End Is Always Near," by Nick Gillespie
"Ken Burns, Lynn Novick: How Closed Borders Helped Facilitate the Holocaust," by Nick Gillespie
Send your questions to roundtable@reason.com. Be sure to include your social media handle and the correct pronunciation of your name.
Today's sponsors:
Audio production by Ian Keyser; assistant production by Hunt Beaty.
Music: "Angeline," by The Brothers Steve
The post Campus Speech Restrictions Come Back To Bite Universities appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>Over the past decade, no legal scholar has pushed arguments for free speech as far or as influentially as today's guest: Jeff Kosseff, a former journalist who now teaches cybersecurity law at the U.S. Naval Academy. In previous books, he defended Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act in The Twenty-Six Words That Created the Internet and stood up for anonymous speech in The United States of Anonymous: How the First Amendment Shaped Online Speech.
His new book is his boldest yet. It's called Liar in a Crowded Theater: Freedom of Speech in a World of Misinformation and I liked it so much that I blurbed it, calling it "a smart, wry, deeply researched and utterly convincing defense of legal protections for 'misinformation' in an age when we are less likely to agree on basic facts than ever before."
We talk about why "misinformation"—however defined—should be legally protected, how the boundaries between private companies and government are getting blurrier and blurrier, and why so many journalists are calling for limits on the First Amendment.
Today's sponsors:
The post Jeff Kosseff: Why False Speech Deserves First Amendment Protections appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>In this week's The Reason Roundtable, editors Matt Welch, Katherine Mangu-Ward, Nick Gillespie, and Peter Suderman consider the ouster of Rep. George Santos (R–N.Y.) from Congress and unpack the debate between Gov. Ron DeSantis and Gov. Gavin Newsom, before examining the legacy of former U.S. Secretary of State Henry Kissinger.
01:33—Rep. George Santos (R–N.Y.) ousted from Congress
12:42—What matters when donating to Reason
17:19—Gov. Ron DeSantis vs. Gov. Gavin Newsom debate aftermath
34:19—Weekly listener question
47:03—This week's cultural recommendations
Mentioned in this podcast:
"George Santos Arrested, Indicted on 13 Federal Counts, Pleads Not Guilty," by Joe Lancaster
"The Political Lies That Really Matter," by Nick Gillespie and Justin Zuckerman
"How Do We Solve a Problem Like George Santos?" by Matt Welch
"Why Did George Santos Lie About His Past To Get Elected to Congress?" by Scott Shackford
"Ask Reason Magazine's Editors Anything: Webathon 2023!" by Matt Welch, Katherine Mangu-Ward, Nick Gillespie, and Peter Suderman
"The DeSantis-Newsom Debate Was Really a Debate About COVID," by Eric Boehm
"Is California Over?" by Nick Gillespie and Regan Taylor
"Florida vs. California," by Matt Welch, Katherine Mangu-Ward, Peter Suderman, and Nick Gillespie
"Jeb Bush: Why Florida Is Winning," by Nick Gillespie, Adam Czarnecki, and Justin Zuckerman
"California's Recall Is a Revolt Against Gov. Gavin Newsom's Progressive Agenda," by Zach Weissmueller
"Henry Kissinger's Deadly Career Gives the Lie to the Myth of the Disinterested Statesman," by Christian Britschgi
"In Search of Libertarian Realism," by Matt Welch, Sheldon Richman, William Ruger, Christopher Preble, and Fernando Tesón
"A Tribute To Henry Kissinger," by Howard Landis
"Poor, Misunderstood Kissinger," by Jacob Sullum
"Henry Kissinger Rollins on Statecraft" by Nick Gillespie
"Reason Can Do More Good With Your Money Than Government Can: Contribute to Our Annual Webathon," by Katherine Mangu-Ward
"How Reason Changes Minds, Lives, and Laws by Covering Criminal Injustice," by Matt Welch
"Give to Reason and Help Create the Next Generation of Libertarians!" by Nick Gillespie
Send your questions to roundtable@reason.com. Be sure to include your social media handle and the correct pronunciation of your name.
Today's sponsors:
Audio production by Ian Keyser
Assistant production by Hunt Beaty
Music: "Angeline" by The Brothers Steve
The post Goodbye to George Santos and Henry Kissinger appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>It's that special time of year again when we ask you to open your wallets, dear listener, and make a tax-deductible donation to Reason's annual webathon.
In this special video episode of The Reason Roundtable, editors Matt Welch, Katherine Mangu-Ward, Nick Gillespie, and Peter Suderman respond to an array of listener questions.
More Christians in the liberty movement? Is it a weird time for libertarianism? How to best celebrate the 250th birthday of the United States? Plus, Nick's treasured pen, Katherine's socks, Peter's power of the Mai Tai, and Matt's favorite pizza.
All this and so much more on this week's extra special episode of The Reason Roundtable.
Now go donate, you wonderful swashbuckling bunch of free-thinking freaks!
Audio production by Ian Keyser; assistant production by Hunt Beaty.
Music: "Angeline," by The Brothers Steve
Videography by Isaac Reese, Justin Zuckerman, and Adam Czarnecki; edited by Adam Czarnecki.
The post Ask <I>Reason</I> Magazine's Editors Anything: Webathon 2023! appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>In its early years, the long-running animated sitcom The Simpsons was famous for laughable characters who would shout, "WILL SOMEONE PLEASE THINK OF THE CHILDREN?!" at the drop of a hat, a smart parody of increasingly ubiquitous attempts to push political and cultural agendas by invoking society's most vulnerable members. Only a few weeks ago, I wrote a Reason column about the show's slow, sad embrace of just such an attitude regarding pater familias Homer's cartoon violence toward his son Bart and other offenses to "enlightened" sensibilities.
But now, as we enter the weekend period of Reason's webathon—the one time a year we ask our readers, viewers, and listeners to make tax-deductible donations to fund our principled libertarian journalism—I unironically ask you TO THINK OF THE CHILDREN! (And while you're doing that, go here to check out different giving levels and associated swag; and yes, we accept bitcoin, fiat currency, and almost anything short of live or dead animals.)
Give me a minute to explain.
Established in 1968 as a mimeographed magazine by Boston University student Lanny Friedlander (who died in 2011), Reason has over the ensuing decades become a full-fledged media juggernaut. Our monthly mag goes out to 52,000 subscribers, our podcasts are downloaded 530,000 times a month, our website pulls 3 million visits a month, and our videos generate on average 5.1 million views a month. We've got 43,500 Instagram followers; 282,000 Twitter (alright, X) followers; 363,000 daily email newsletter readers; 618,000 Facebook followers; and 868,000 YouTube subscribers. (All figures are from our Fiscal Year 2023, which ended in September.)
As our reach and visibility have grown, so has our readership among and influence on younger people, who are constantly being told in explicit and implicit ways that they are entering a world that is completely devoid of common decency and moral virtue, uniquely destructive to psychological and emotional health, and fundamentally unsustainable from environmental and economic perspectives. There are right- and left-wing variants to these metanarratives of doom and gloom, but they are absolutely everywhere you look: Don't have kids because of the environment (or because they're too expensive)! Gender fluidity must be eradicated from public life entirely and, besides, Atrazine is turning frogs and boys gay! There are too many flavors of deodorant to choose from, which is both psychologically demotivating and economically wasteful. School shooters, child molesters, stochastic terrorism, and unnaturally thin social media influencers have taken complete control of American life!
As psychologist and Generation Disaster: Coming of Age Post-9/11 author Karla Vermeulen told me in the video below, Millennials and Gen Zers have been bombarded since birth with messages that their world is utterly and totally doomed.
No wonder that across the board, Millennials and Gen Zers tend to report significantly higher levels of stress, anxiety, and depression than Gen Xers and Boomers do. They've simply been attentive to what American Enterprise Institute sociologist Scott Winship calls "declension narratives," or stories about how the past was better and the present and future really just kind of totally suck. Watch this short video for a discussion of "3 Myths About American Decline" and why they are misguided when not just totally false.
Reason stands athwart such toxic pessimism "yelling Stop," as National Review long ago promised to do vis-à-vis history. But unlike conservatives, we aren't constantly trying to breathe life into dead-but-with-us-still institutions, attitudes, and mindsets. We celebrate economic, cultural, and political creative destruction that allows societies to grow, innovate, and flourish while also maintaining continuity with the past. And we consistently take this piss out of the apocalypse du jour by showing younger people (and older ones, too!) that "Free Minds and Free Markets" are already making the world a better place—and could do even more if we were all given a little more freedom.
Younger people don't need to be hectored about what might have worked in some supposed Golden Age past. They need to be given realistic analyses of today's world and what sorts of policies might work in the future. We've been delivering the goods on that front, especially with short videos that whet the appetite for deeper dives on all sorts of policy areas. Consider this YouTube short featuring Andrew Heaton that talks about how housing policy has made it virtually impossible to build new apartment buildings in many major urban areas. The video has pulled 2 million views, and 57 percent of those watching are under 35 years old.
Or consider this TikTok featuring Reason's Billy Binion, which was similarly popular among younger people. In less than a minute, he deftly explains the looming threat of eminent domain abuse. Interested readers can comb through hundreds of articles about eminent domain by Christian Britschgi, C.J. Ciaramella, Joe Lancaster, and others.
@reasonmagazine Eminent domain allows the state to take someone's property as long as they provide just compensation. Sometimes it's for important utility projects, but often it's for political pet projects like tourist attractions or an electric vehicle factory. #blacktiktok #property
And if Millennials and Zoomers have been subjected to a steady stream of socialist propaganda in their K-12 and college years, Reason is robustly advancing the argument that it's capitalism that has produced a historic reduction in global poverty. Cue Robby Soave:
View this post on Instagram
Which is a roundabout way of answering the question in the subtitle of this post. Who's thinking about the children, especially as they grow up and move out into the world? Reason is, and we're offering persuasive counternarratives to the negative and false messages about the future being sent from the right and left.
When I started at Reason back in 1993, I'd say that the biggest sources of new libertarians were the works of Ayn Rand, Milton Friedman, and maybe Robert Heinlein—writers and public figures who in very different but effective ways made the case for individualism, minimal government, and increasing freedom in all areas of human activity. Toward the end of the aughts, Ron Paul became a major factor, especially among younger people. So was the state of the world itself and the politicians who ran it. Endless elective wars, a financial crisis that was clearly the result of massive and disparate government interventions into all sorts of economic activity, and bald-faced lying about surveillance on the part of successive presidents and presidential candidates also played a huge role, too.
But so has Reason in all its permutations. I've talked about how Reason played the chief role in my own political awakening, and television legends such as Drew Carey and John Stossel have given credit where credit is due. In 2007, Carey told Time, "I never thought I was a libertarian until I picked up Reason magazine and realized I agree with everything they had printed." And in 2011, Stossel told viewers of his Fox Business show:
I looked in The New York Times and the lefty press that we were reading and it was all about got to have much more government doing everything. And I turned to the conservative press and the conservative press was all upset about sex, drugs and rock 'n' roll. And upset about homosexuality, and it just didn't make sense to me. I finally discovered Reason magazine….And that was an epiphany for me. It was like, wow, these people get it. Wow, they really get it, much better than I do.
Now more than ever, Reason is helping to create the next generation of libertarians by producing more and more content that finds Millennials and Gen Zers where they live and that speaks to the mix of idealism and exhaustion they evince. Without speaking down to them (or to anyone else, for that matter), we report on the real state of the world, what's working and what's not, and how to create a future in which more and more of us get to live how we want to live.
If you want to help create tomorrow's libertarians, support Reason today with a tax-deductible donation. Your gift is currently being matched, meaning it goes twice as far when it comes to writing more articles, recording more podcasts, and producing more videos. Give now!
The post Give to <i>Reason</i> and Help Create the Next Generation of Libertarians! appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>This is a bonus episode, hosted by Reason Features Editor Peter Suderman. A few weeks back, at our Washington, D.C. HQ, he moderated a discussion with former Reason Editor in Chief Virginia Postrel (Reason archive here)and American Enterprise Institute Fellow James Pethokoukis about the future—why it matters, why it's misunderstood, and how we might get a better one.
Both have written extensively on the topic. Postrel is the author of many books, including The Future and Its Enemies. Pethokoukis is the author of the just-released The Conservative Futurist—How to Create the Sci-Fi World We Were Promised.
It's a great conversation about economics, progress, science fiction—and kitchen gadgets.
Today's sponsor:
The post Virginia Postrel & Jim Pethokoukis: How To Get a Great Future appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>Visit reason.com/donate and contribute to Reason's annual webathon, now through Tuesday, December 5.
Your gifts are tax-deductible and go directly to funding our print and online journalism, video productions, and podcasts. What's more, donations are being matched, so every dollar you give goes twice as far.
If you like what we've been doing—and what we will keep doing—donate today; you'll be glad you did.
The post <i>Reason</i> and Nick Gillespie Need Your Support appeared first on Reason.com.
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